I have been anticipating the release of the 23andMe service in Canada for awhile now. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a personal genome test service which takes some of your saliva and analyzes your DNA. I was interested in submitting my DNA for testing by for a long time it was a US-only service (possibly some ways to get around that). Then the FDA cracked down on the service so you could not get the full suite of their health analysis.

The rumors was that 23andMe would launch in Canada and the service here would not be limited by the FDA decision. Finally in October, they launched and I paid the $200 to do a test. 23andMe offers 2 basic services: 1) Genetic tests to see your risk factors for certain diseases (big ones are Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s) and 2) Ancestry analysis. It turns out that they still don’t do as many genetic tests as they did prior to the FDA crackdown, and the set they do now (aside from the Big 2) are not that well known. I didn’t have a strong personal interest in the genetic tests, and had more interest in the ancestry analysis. But my main attraction in trying the service was curiosity in seeing what my DNA can reveal.

After purchase, the kit to collect my saliva came pretty fast (ordered on Friday, arrived on Monday). After spending 5 minutes spitting, I sent it off the next day. My saliva got sent to a location in Canada where it looked like it was bundled with some other kits and sent to their processing facility in the US. That took about a week (it seems like it had to go through custom clearance due to biological material?). Then another week for them to do the analysis. All told, it took about 2.5 weeks to get my results.

The results were a bit underwhelming. The don’t test as many things as I thought they would in terms of genetic characteristics (i.e., whether you are lactose tolerant or not) and the number of genetic risk factors is also small. There’s always promise that they will add more risk factors and your DNA analysis will automatically be applied to those. The ancestry result was also not too interesting, although that might be because the result lined up with what I thought my genetics would be. There’s a feature to find DNA relatives, and 23andMe found a couple – but they were all beyond 3rd cousins so we are not really related (of course this feature depends on the number of people using 23andMe).

For the price, I don’t think you get sufficient value out of it (especially if there are no surprises). However, I am interested in progressing the field and my understanding of my DNA so the $200 to become a member of this service is my investment in that.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: bigdata, genetics, quantifiedself