[adventured]

Every time I see articles like this, it reminds me how much the FDA's poor treatment of the genetic testing market infuriates me. What the FDA has done to 23andMe is disgusting (an Illumina customer).

Why can't I spend $99 and find out if I have a prominent heart disease marker, that killed both my father and grandfather by 55? Because the healthcare market is regulated by the government for the benefit of various cartels. They want me to spend thousands of dollars and be forced to go through layers of doctors to get the same results instead.

[davecap1]

You still can! You just can't ask them to interpret the results for you. 23andMe will still give you access to your raw genetic variant data, they just won't tell you what it "means", simply because what they say might be incorrect. Genetic data interpretation is still quite hard to reproduce, and is very expensive to do well... which is why the FDA has been slow to regulate it.

The datasets used by 23andMe to interpret your genetic variants are the same datasets that you can get access to for free! If you know how to program, then you can use public datasets from the NCBI (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) or SolveBio (my startup, http://solve.bio) to compare your raw data to the clinical reference information you're interested in.

[melling]

I guess you missed where people were getting different "interpretations" from different companies.

[pkaye]

People also get different "interpretations" from different doctors.