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Here’s the latest action:

Six Apart evolves into an ad network — The blogging company behind MovableType, TypePad and Vox is offering a new advertising program which will give publishers more control over ads and revenue from their sites. The company claims its ad network will be better than the many others out there (with more popping up everyday) because it has the best experience with advertisements specific to blogs. The company also launched Six Apart Services after acquiring Apperceptive, a New York-based company that has helped build communities for large sites such as The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and Boing Boing. Six Apart vice president, Anil Dash has more.

Microsoft acquires Xobni, maybe — The email startup, which Bill Gates has called “the next generation of social networking,” has supposedly signed a letter of intent to be purchased by the software giant, sources tell TechCrunch, apparently for $20 million. But not so fast,  we reached co-founder Matt Brezina on his cell, who said it was too early to comment. He said the company remains focused on rolling out product for general release. He did seem remarkably relaxed, suggesting the deal may not yet be in final stages, but it was hard to tell. He was sauntering on the Penn State campus, about to start a lecture to students, providing tips about entrepreneurship. Now we’re seeing other sources say no letter has been signed and that the company plans to remain independent until it gets its product out. Our guess is that Microsoft has offered, but that no deal has been signed yet. Xobni works as a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook and allows users to easily view past related conversations and search quickly through mail — which sounds a lot like Google’s Gmail.

Sequoia adds another partner to start broader investment initiatve — The WSJ’s Rebecca Buckman follows up on rumors that Sequoia is seeking to broaden its activities, confirming the hiring of Eric Upin and Keith Johnson, both of the Stanford Management Company. They’re creating an investment fund that would “invest in multiple asset classes, instead of just venture capital… The new vehicle — if it gets off the ground — likely would mimic the investment style of university endowments and other private funds that put money into stocks and bonds but also ‘alternative investments,’ such as buyout funds, venture capital and natural-resources investments.”

23andMe admits personal genetics have no medical purpose — Google raised eyebrows when it made investments in both genetic screening company, 23andMe (started by Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife) and Navigenics, another company that allows you to see your genome. Now under scrutiny in states like New York, services like these are being forced to admit they are little more than a vanity. “23andMe’s services are not medical … they are educational,” 23andMe spokesman Paul Kranhold told Forbes.

Attack of the Mac clones — Computer maker Psystar continues to grab headlines with its OS X-enabled (Apple’s operating system) computer. Apple does not allow 3rd parties to create Mac computers, whereas dozens of manufacters make Windows-based PCs. But with Apple’s market-share and demand on the rise, there certainly seems to be a market out there for a very low-cost Mac. Apple’s Mac Mini is currently the cheapest they offer at $599, but this Psystar system would be $399 with no software installed. Naturally, the legality of making these systems without Apple’s blessing is an issue.

John Battelle is first “John” in Google, shows Google is broken — Look, we all like John Battelle, the founder and chairman of Federated Media (which runs some of the ads on VentureBeat), but come on, he’s the number one result when you type “John” into Google’s search box? “I mean, I am ahead of Lennon. The Gospel. Er…McCain,” Battelle himself notes. I could go on: John Adams, John Hancock, John F. Kennedy, etc. With all due respect, I think it’s fair to say that most of the world has no idea who John Battelle is, yet that’s who they’ll find when they search for one of the most common names in the English language.

(UPDATED: Added links from Davos. Also, an earlier version of this post originally appeared at the end of this item.)

While I’ve been diving into deCODEme’s surprisingly spotty personal-genomics service, 23andMe has been whooping it up in Europe. The startup launched its consumer gene-scanning service there and made a splash at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where it handed out 1,000 free saliva-collection kits to attendees and another 50 for “elite journalists.” (Google’s Sergei Brin — the husband of 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki — was even spotted wearing a badge reading “I spat!” at a small meeting of Google officials and reporters.)

This is all very clever PR for 23andMe, not to mention a cunning way to capitalize on the company’s close association with Google’s star power (Google is a 23andMe investor). And, to her credit, Wojcicki appears to be downplaying the usefulness of disease-risk prediction at this point, noting correctly that the underlying science is still awfully preliminary in most cases. Still, at the moment it’s impossible to really assess 23andMe’s offering unless you pony up $999 or luck into one of their free kits, as the company is still just “thinking” about making a reference genotype available to the public at large, according to one of its PR reps.

Meanwhile, another startup is getting into the personal-genomics game. SeqWright, a Houston company that until now has focused on contract genome-sequencing for research labs and drug companies, launched its Genetic Profiling Service for exactly $1 less than what 23andMe is charging — $998. From the outside, it’s impossible to tell how SeqWright expects to distinguish itself from its better-known competitor, although there’s something just a bit forlorn about the company’s attempts to play up its credentials. Witness, for instance, this, from a section of the Web site the startup calls “Why SeqWright”:

Personal Genomics may be a new field but, we have been utilizing the microarray technology, which makes it possible, for nearly three years.

Wow, three whole years? Microarrays — colloquially known as “gene chips” — have been used for genomic analysis for well over a decade.

Also, I can’t help noting that Navigenics, which at last notice was supposed to be launching its own health-oriented personal-genomics service earlier this year, has been awfully quiet recently.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis spits and tells at Davos, and a blogger for the NYT weighs in as well.

(UPDATED: See below.)

Personal-genomics vendors like 23andMe and deCODEme, which promise to give ordinary individuals a peek at their genetic inheritance, have received a ton of press attention since they launched last November (not least of all from us — see here and here for starters). Unless you happened to have a spare $1,000 laying around, however, you were pretty much out of luck if you simply wanted to know exactly what you might be getting for your cash.

Until now, that is. On Monday, deCODEme — the precious capitalization is intensely annoying, but I’ve bowed to the inevitable, since even the NYT uses it now — began offering a “demo user” that allows anyone to poke around in the results from a reference genome. While it obviously doesn’t tell you anything about your own particular genetic makeup, it can certainly help give you a sense of what sort of information the service provides for your $985 (which, to be clear, is an “introductory price” — deCODEme hasn’t said what it will charge once the “introduction” is over).

My capsule summary: At this stage, deCODEme doesn’t appear to offer a heckuva lot of value for what it’s charging. The service will presumably grow and evolve over time, but for now, you’re probably best off exploring other options — or simply waiting for the technology to improve and prices to drop.

Like 23andMe, deCODEme essentially offers its customers a kind of shorthand scan of their genomes — not a full reading of the six billion DNA “letters” (technically, base pairs) that make up our 23 pairs of chromosomes, but a gene-chip analysis that identifies roughly one million sites where the letters are known to vary between individuals. In a rough sense, each such variation — technically known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs — determines which version of a particular gene you have.

That information, in turn, may shed light on your susceptibility to particular diseases or predispositions toward certain psychological traits or physical attributes. (A cautionary note: The science of linking gene variation to actual individual characteristics like this is still in its infancy, and many experts — including some who recently held forth in the New England Journal of Medicine, caution against reading too much into these relationships. deCODEme also advises against making medical decisions based on its information — a good thing, too, as we’ll see.) To get the analysis, customers swab the inside of their cheek with a high-tech Q-tip, then mail it in to deCODEme, which collects the cells from the swab, runs the analysis, and posts the resulting information in a supposedly secure location on the Web.

Activating the reference genome (it can also be reached via a link on the deCODEme home page, although it’s fairly inconspicuous) brings you to a page — click on the thumbnail at left for a larger view — with four basic tools. “My Gene Profile” lets you browse through a variety of disease conditions — 18 at the moment — and to calculate your known genetic risk of developing them. Other tools predict your hair and eye color based on your genetic makeup, trace your ancestry and measure your genetic similarity to 53 ethnic groups from around the world, and let you share and compare your genetic profile, or genotype, with any “friends” or family members who’ve also joined up with deCODEme.

At first glance, that looks like a lot of information, but it doesn’t take long to find the deCODEme system intensely frustrating. (For the sake of readability, I’ll describe the demo genome as if it actually represented my own results — which, of course, it doesn’t.) The gene-profile section, for instance (see the thumbnail at left), lists the 18 conditions for which deCODEme thinks there is enough hard evidence linking genes to disease to calculate your genetic risks. Clicking on any of the diseases, a list that runs from age-related macular degeneration, or AMD (vision loss in the elderly), to type 2 diabetes, takes you to a description of the disease and several tabs that outline your particular susceptibility to the condition, the scientific underpinnings for the risk calculation, and a list of possible risk factors and preventative steps you might take in order to ward off your “genetic fate.”

All nifty enough. A quick look through the first several conditions reveals that “I” have an especially low risk of ending up with Alzheimer’s disease or celiac disease (an autoimmune gastrointestinal disorder), but a higher-than-average chance of going blind or developing asthma. (See “my” Alzheimer’s risk thumbnail to the left.) The interface, however, is incredibly clumsy — checking your risk factors for each of the 18 conditions here will take a while, as the site requires you to click into each one, then click again for your risk calculation, and then click out again to get back to the main gene-profile page. I gave up after looking through the first six, although I’d undoubtedly be more curious were this my actual genotype.

Worse, at least for information gluttons like me, the “scientific details” available for each condition are pretty thin, and are presented in a way that isn’t likely to make sense to anyone but geneticists. (See thumbnail at left.) Many of the risk calculations seem to be based on a single SNP, which means they are bound to be misleading, since the evidence to date strongly suggests that most diseases are the result of interplay between dozens or hundreds of genes, any of which might either elevate your risk or offer protection against the disease. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to search for particular SNPs in your genotype, which would be useful if you happened to see a recent scientific disease-risk finding and wanted to see how it might affect you. (UPDATE: I’ve taken a closer look at all of deCODEme’s disease-risk calculations here.)

One final nitpick before moving on — the gene-profile page offers two additional viewing options, both oddly implemented and, at least in their current form, basically useless. For instance, it’s possible to identify diseases that affect particular organs by clicking on a human-body graphic, although for some reason Alzheimer’s disease isn’t listed when you select the head. (In fact, it’s not included in any of the highlighted organ systems.) You can also choose to view disease traits that are associated with one of your 23 chromosomes, a feature for which I still can’t figure out a use unless you happen to be a biology student.

The “physical attributes” tool is, at the moment, little more than a joke (thumbnail at left), as it does nothing but “predict” your hair and eye color. (Unsurprisingly, given that the reference genome is most likely Icelandic — deCODEme’s parent company is based there — “my” hair is likely red and “my” eyes are probably blue.) Presumably this section will offer more information as scientific knowledge accumulates, but at the moment it’s not clear why deCODEme included it at all.

Meanwhile, the “ancestry” page (left) serves up some very hard-to-decipher graphics that are supposed to illustrate your genetic commonality with the rest of humanity, but which just ended up confusing the heck out of me. (I subsequently figured out that the large numbers on each pop-up balloon rank your degree of relatedness with the various geographic regions, so “I” am most closely related to people of European descent, then those from Southwest Asia, then East Asia, and so on.) Clicking a balloon gives you further ethnic-group detail from that particular part of the world. For the moment, this and the related “ancestry” items look like curiosities and little more.

Finally, there’s “Compare Me,” the supposed heart of the social network deCODEme hopes to build around people and their genotypes (thumbnail at left). To say this function looks lame would be one heck of an understatement. Compare yourself to a friend or relative from the list and you get a cool-looking but almost information-free chromosomal map that purports to illustrate the genetic regions you have in common with the other individual, only without providing any information beyond colored bars on blobby chromosomes. (You can zoom in, but that just makes the colored bars bigger and the chromosomes blobbier.) A “relationship check” link promises to determine how closely related you might be, but anyone less related to you than a parent or child yields a major rat’s nest of possible family ties — for instance, click here to see what it returned when I compared “myself” to “my” nephew.

Disappointingly, one of the potentially interesting features here should let you download your genotype, but unfortunately it’s not enabled for the demo account.

Now, it’s entirely possible that deCODEme may not have implemented its most up-to-date features on the demo account, although I can’t see why it wouldn’t — the idea is presumably to entice users to sign up for the service, not to show them a crippled version and still expect them to cough up some serious bucks. It’s equally possible that the service could radically improve in short order over what the company is showing here.

If so, I’m more than willing to take another look. For now, though, I have to say that if I’d just plunked down $985 for deCODEme, I’d be royally pissed, both at the waste of money and at the lack of information, flexibility and user-friendly functionality here. I’m kind of astonished that deCODEme thinks this version of its service resembles a finished product in any way, shape or form.

In any case, I’ll review 23andMe if they ever follow through on earlier indications that they might also provide a reference genome for exploration, as well as any other related services such as Navigenics or Knome. (By the way, the Houston Chronicle recently reported that two other Texas companies, Family Tree DNA and Seqwright, also plan to launch personal-genomics services. Hat tip to the Genetic Genealogist.)

Have you signed up for deCODEme? Share your experience in comments.

(UPDATED: See below.)

Personal genomics is finally here.

23andMe, the Google-backed startup that promises to let individuals search and share their personal genetic information, just unveiled its service on its Web site. (A formal announcement is planned for Monday. For links to our previous coverage, see the end of this post or click here.) For $999, anyone can spit in a plastic tube the company will send you, then mail it back for a kind of shortcut scan of their genome. Technically, the company will use gene chips to determine which of roughly 600,000 single-letter DNA variants, technically known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, an individual possesses.

Those SNPs make it possible to get a rough sense of exactly which gene mutations reside in your genome, and thus what sort of probabilistic fate — nothing is predetermined, although your genes may predispose you to certain diseases or behaviors — your genetic code might have in store for you. 23andMe will put your genetic information up on what it says will be an extremely secure Web site for you to explore for disease risk, genealogy or personal ancestry.

23andMe, of course, isn’t the only company dipping its toes into these waters. A few weeks ago, another Silicon Valley startup called Navigenics made a big splay by “launching” its own personal-genomics service via press release, even though the company won’t be actually offering genome scans until next year. Navigenics is also determined to toe the ethical line, and so will only offer customers carefully selected information about their genome and what it says about the risk of developing particular diseases, essentially turning a full-genome scan into a sort of glorified set of individual genetic tests. That service, by the way, is slated to cost $2,500 plus an annual subscription cost of $250 or so. 23andMe is already looking like a far more interesting option, particularly for “infovores” who crave as much information about themselves as possible.

Iceland-based DeCode Genetics also just launched a personal-genomics service it calls DeCodeMe, which I’ll discuss in greater detail in a subsequent post.

23andMe’s new Web site is spare and clean, offering a concise explanation of the personal-genomics service:

The “Gene Journal” (click on the first thumbnail at left for a larger image) offers a number of tools designed to help you make sense of your genome scan, from an “odds calculator” that helps you determine what your individual genetic profile suggests about your risk of developing conditions such as heart disease or cancer. A “marker effects” chart sums up what’s known about the effects of different genetic variants, which may increase your risk of disease or offer protection against it. The site is chock-full of scientific references, background information, FAQs and even perspectives from medical doctors on the significance of genetics and various conditions.

In addition to the Gene Journal, 23andMe also offers a “family inheritance” section (second thumbnail at left) that lets you trace genes through your family history and even lay your genome out against those of relatives who’ve also been genotyped by 23andMe. An ancestry section (third thumbnail at left) shows you how genetically similar you are to people around the world, and to compare your ancestry with those of family, friends, and historical figures via maternal inheritance (technically, via mitochondrial DNA) and, soon, paternal inheritance (via markers on the male-only Y chromosome).

Best of all, at least for those curious enough and scientifically inclined, a “genome labs” section (fourth thumbnail) lets you browse through your genome via what appear to be straightforward and uncluttered graphical interfaces. You can see how similar your genome is to that of other individuals who have been scanned, either by comparing overall genomes or by simply focusing on particular inherited traits. A “genome explorer” lets you browse through your chromosomes, which are graphically represented in the last thumbnail at left. It’s also possible to look up particular SNPs directly to see the current state of knowledge linking them to particular physical traits or disease risks.

All that looks nifty enough, although it’s difficult to get too deep into the site without actually getting genotyped and seeing exactly how those tools work. The information available to the casual browser is certainly intriguing, and it’s far more detailed than Navigenics offers. (The DeCodeMe site looks similarly detailed, although you have to go through a free registration to see it.) If I get a chance to actually try out the service — assuming I’m ready to actually entrust one of these companies with my genetic information — I’ll let you know what it looks like from the inside.

On a purely business level, though, it’s not entirely clear how 23andMe intends to make money. Presumably the company will get into that during its scheduled Monday Webcast, and if not I’ll do my best to get a better sense of the company’s business plan.

Two other things are particularly striking about 23andMe’s service. The first is the complete absence of any reference to genetic counseling. The company seems to believe that people are capable of looking squarely at their genomes and the associated risk information it embodies without the need for support services aimed at helping them understand the context of their particular genetic variations. That may be right or wrong, but it’s very interesting in light of the effort Navigenics and other genetic-testing services like DNAdirect are taking to ensure that people don’t freak out if their gene scan delivers bad news. (More precisely, the possibility of bad news — once again, genes aren’t destiny, although they clearly influence the likelihood of various diseases.)

Similarly, and significantly, 23andMe also claims that it’s not delivering medical advice or actual genetic testing. For instance, here’s the relevant part of the site’s disclaimer, which you have to click through during the sign-up process:

23andMe’s service is not a test or kit designed to diagnose disease or medical conditions, and it is not intended to be medical advice. If you have concerns or questions about what you learn through 23andMe, you should contact your physician or other appropriate professional.

This is clearly 23andMe’s strategy for sidestepping FDA regulation of its service, and it strikes me as a fairly risky play. After all, 23andMe presumably offers you exactly the same information that existing, FDA-regulated genetic tests do (and then some, of course). On the other hand, it’s also entirely possible that a whole-genome SNP scan falls into a regulatory no man’s land, particularly if the company makes no attempt to market the service as medically useful. This will definitely be an area to watch.

Obviously, privacy and security will remain concerns for many people, although there’s no good way to gauge how well 23andMe will protect genetic data in advance. More concerning, perhaps, is the question of what happens if — or when — some of the company’s customers react badly to genomic bad news. Bioethicists have long feared that some people might commit suicide, get depressed, or experience other major problems if they get unwelcome news from genetic tests — thus the emphasis on genetic counseling at other testing services. If the worst does come to pass, the following paragraph in 23andMe’s disclaimer is unlikely to be much comfort.

You may learn information about yourself that you do not anticipate. This information may evoke strong emotions and has the potential to alter your life and worldview. You may discover things about yourself that trouble you and that you may not have the ability to control or change (e.g., your father is not genetically your father, surprising facts related to your ancestry, or that someone with your genotype may have a higher than average chance of developing a specific condition or disease). These outcomes could have social, legal, or economic implications.

However these issues play out, it seems clear that the launch of these services represents our collective first step into our new genome-centric future. Good luck to us all.

Further reading:

• Google, Genentech fund personal-genetics startup 23andMe
• Personal-genetics startup Navigenics, a competitor to Google-backed 23andMe, unstealths
• Craig Venter’s genome and our brave new world
• Personal genomics and the end of insurance
• Decoding 23andMe — Illumina spills the beans
• Genetic genealogy hits the big time
• Complete Genomics and BioNanomatrix rev up the fast, cheap and out-of-control genome race
• Will 23andMe and Navigenics lock up your genome and charge you for the key?
• Navigenics finally offers you a peek at your genome — except not really, and not yet

UPDATE: Wired’s Tom Goetz got a sneak peek at both 23andMe and Navigenics, and has written it up for the magazine and in a complementary blog post. Additional, the NYT’s Amy Harmon also got herself genotyped and wrote about it here.

UPDATE REDUX: I take a closer look at 23andMe’s likely business model in this subsequent post.

(UPDATED: See below.)

So at long last, one of the personal-genomics companies we’ve been writing about since May has finally launched its service. Navigenics, the Redwood City, Calif., startup that promises users a “personalized genetics analysis” so they can better manage their health risks, kicked off its business yesterday with a drum-rolling press release and a story clearly handed to the WSJ. (For a non-subscription version, click here.)

Except that, as it turns out, Navigenics hasn’t really launched anything. Yes, the company announced that it’s raised a second round of funding, for a total of more than $25 million — more on that below, including the fact that I’m told Google has also quietly invested in Navigenics — but neither its release nor its Web site provide any details on what its genetic-testing service will look like, what it will cost, or how individuals can order it. According to Amy DuRoss, the company’s head of business affairs, Navigenics won’t actually start offering genetic-test results until the first quarter of next year, so if you were hoping to jump on the personal genomics bandwagon now, you’d better brace yourself for disappointment.

What Navigenics is doing, according to DuRoss, is taking pre-orders for the testing service, which will essentially scan your genome for individual DNA “letters” (technically, nucleotides or base pairs) that differ from those in established “reference” genomes. Scanning several million of these single-nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, should give you a shorthand read of your individual genetic variation. Studies of SNPs and how they differ in people prone to one disease or another are starting to roll out with great regularity, providing for the first time a solid scientific basis for linking your particular genetic profile to disease risk.

Navigenics, however, doesn’t plan to give you full access to that readout. Instead, as I noted earlier, the company will store your gene profile and then provide you with carefully limited information that essentially amounts to particular genetic tests that it believes have been medically validated. Even then, it will only offer them for conditions that can be treated or prevented. (In other words, you probably shouldn’t count on learning whether you have Huntington’s disease here.) Over time, as more of these genetic variations are linked to disease risk, Navigenics will tell you how your genome stacks up.

All this comes at a cost, and while it’s nowhere near as expensive as it earlier sounded like it might be, it’s still not remotely cheap. Pricing still isn’t final, but the company’s DuRoss says an initial registration fee will run around $2,500 and will cover a year of the Navigenics service. Additional years will probably be priced at around $250. That makes Navigenics’ offering substantially more expensive, at least in the short run, than most individual genetic tests you can order directly from companies like DNAdirect. (The main exception is the breast-cancer test for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene variants, which can cost upward of $3,000 thanks to the extortionate price charged by the patent holder, Myriad Genetics. No word yet on how Navigenics plans to finesse that fee, or whether it thinks it can sidestep it.)

DuRoss says Navigenics will initially offer about 20 tests, although if you’re curious which ones those will be — well, you’ll just have to wait. It’s not even exactly clear how the company will begin to take “pre-orders” for the service, given that the Web site still doesn’t feature any information on the subject beyond an email link through which people can request more information.

By the way, DuRoss also says that Navigenics doesn’t plan to lock away your genetic information, as I earlier suggested. Supposedly the company will supply “raw” genetic data to individuals upon request, although exactly how and in what format it might do so wasn’t entirely clear from our conversation. (DuRoss talked about the raw data as a dump equivalent to 2,000 printed pages, which isn’t a particularly useful way of thinking about it.) It still sounds to me as if Navigenics is counting on locking its customers into its service as much as possible, although over time, perhaps it will be possible to transfer your genome scan to another service. A lot will depend on the details of how all this gets implemented, and as you have probably gathered by now, most of those still simply aren’t available.

In other words, it still sounds a lot more like corporate genomics than personal genomics to me. Personally, I’m not that excited about a service that’s going to decide when and how to dole out my own genetic information to me in the form of limited genetic tests. That sort of approach made perfect sense when it simply wasn’t possible to economically look at more than a handful of genes at a time, but since that’s no longer the case, I don’t really see any excuse for a company planning take in these sorts of sums from customers to arrogate to itself what parts of my genome I’m entitled to look at. This makes me all the more curious to see what sort of tack the much buzzier 23andMe (see links to our previous coverage here) ends up taking on this front.

Speaking of 23andMe, the Google-backed startup now may launch its similar personal-genomics service — one combining both disease and genealogical information — by the end of the year, according to the WSJ. Although 23andMe has been quieter than Navigenics, its profile has been higher because of the Google involvement and because its co-founder Anne Wojcicki is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Recently, though, an individual familiar with the deal told me that Google has also quietly invested in Navigenics, although neither company will comment. That would make sense given that Navigenics also just lined up another 23andMe investor, Mohr Davidow Ventures, for its second funding round. (Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers and Sequoia Capital also participated.) Earlier this year, it looked like 23andMe and Navigenics were linking up powerful backers for a horse race; now, though, I’m starting to suspect that a lot of investors are simply hedging their bets — Google, apparently, among them.

UPDATED: Added another several paragraphs and the rumor on Google’s investment in Navigenics.
UPDATE REDUX: Upgraded sourcing on the Google info, which comes from someone with first-hand knowledge of the deal. Of course, no one is officially confirming it yet.

Featured companies: Ganeden Biotech, Glenveigh Medical, Lab21, Lead Therapeutics, Navigenics, Pacific Data Designs, PharMEDium Healthcare, Sloning BioTechnology, VistaGen

UPDATED: Expanded items on Lead Therapeutics, Glenveigh Medical and Sloning BioTech, and moved the Navigenics news to a separate item here.

Lead Therapeutics raises $17M for China-based work in cancer and immunology — San Bruno, Calif.-based Lead Therapeutics, a drug-development startup that plans to do most of its research and development in China, raised $17 million in a first funding round. Investors included Pappas Ventures, ProQuest Investments and Mustang Ventures.

We’ve previously noted a few biotech startups with strong connections to China, although for the most part these have tended to be companies founded by Chinese expatriates who raise much of their funding from Asian sources. (See, for instance, our coverage of AutekBio here and of MicuRx here.) Lead Therapeutics, by contrast, raised much of its money from traditional U.S. venture firms and will be run by a GlaxoSmithKline veteran, Peter Myers, although unsurprisingly enough, several of the company’s other executives appear to have ties to Asia. (See a list here.)

Lead Therapeutics says it has “several” drug-discovery programs going in infectious disease and cancer, but hasn’t disclosed any details to the best of my knowledge.

Glenveigh Medical to pull in $10M for spinning out a device maker — Glenveigh Medical, a Durham, N.C., holding company focused on technologies for obstetrics and fetal care, said it will raise $10 million in a first funding round in order to spin out a new medical-device company, VentureWire reports (subscription required). The spinout company, still unnamed, will develop several medical devices with an eye toward launching two of them by early 2009.

One of the devices, called a pelvic pack, is designed to control heavy bleeding that can result from obstetrical procedures. Another is an implantable plug designed to control fluid loss and prevent infection in cases where the cervix tears prematurely during pregnancy. A third device is a meter designed to measure the onset of labor and related issues via changes in the cervix itself.

Sloning BioTech receives €4.7M for DNA synthesis — Munich-based DNA synthesizer Sloning BioTechnology said it raised €4.7 million ($6.8 million) in a fifth funding round. Investors included LBBW Venture Capital, HBM BioVentures, KfW Bankengruppe and Deutsche Effecten-und Wechsel-Beteiligungsgesellschaft.

Sloning is one of several companies making a business out of generating customized strands of DNA for customers in the nascent field of “synthetic biology,” which involves making artificial genes for industrial purposes. (See also our coverage of DNA2.0 here.) The company claims that its particular method is the only one capable of generating any sequence of DNA “letters,” or nucleotides; for biochemical reasons, other methods are sometimes limited in their ability to produce particular nucleotide sequences.

Navigenics raises $25M, launches personal-genomic pre-orders — See our in-depth story here.

OTHER HEADLINES OF NOTE:

• Navigenics raises more than $25M, launches personal-genomics business (release)
• PharMEDium Healthcare raises undisclosed sum of private equity(PE Hub)
• U.K.’s Lab21 appoints Graham Mullis as CEO (release)
• Pacific Data Designs draws undisclosed sum in private equity (PE Hub)
• Ganeden Biotech pulls in $12M for probiotic dietary supplements (release)
• VistaGen gets $1.2M grant for CNS drug studies (release)

Over the last few months, startups like 23andMe and Navigenics have attracted a fair bit of attention for promising to let ordinary people search through their own genomes to better understand their disease risk, genealogy and ancestry. (For our coverage, see the links at the end of this item.) But one of the first major attempts to take a close look at them — courtesy of the November issue of Portfolio — left me with the distinct impression that these companies may not actually be anywhere near as revolutionary as they seem.

In fact, they might well be a crashing disappointment. Many people (myself included) have tended to look at these startups — particularly 23andMe, with its close ties to Google — as heralds of “personal genomics,” which I’d roughly define as the process of obtaining, searching through and interpreting your individual genetic quirks. If what the Portfolio piece depicts is even close to the truth, however, what these startups bring to market could be far more restricted — not to mention expensive — than most of us have probably imagined.

Let’s put it this way: How would you feel about a company that offered to scan your genes, only to lock up most of the information it finds so it can charge you thousands of dollars a year to dribble it back out to you? I’m not sure the term “personal genomics” would even apply here — it sounds to me a lot more like “corporate genomics,” in which getting access to your genome would require handing it over to a company that assumes it knows better than you do which parts of your genome you’re entitled to see.

If you’re not fond of that idea, you may be out of luck, because that’s pretty much exactly how David Ewing Duncan, the veteran science writer who authored the Portfolio piece, describes Navigenics’ business model:

Navigenics’ market is intended to be people who are healthy and affluent. Customers will be charged between $2,000 and $3,000 to have nearly a million genetic markers tested on a gene chip manufactured by Affymetrix. But Navigenics’ site won’t release all of the data collected by the chip, only the designated panel of gene tests. The company plans to offer information and telephone support from genetic counselors, and a subscription to its service will last a year. “Your DNA will be on file, and we’ll test it against new findings,” says Amy DuRoss, Navigenics’ head of policy and business affairs.

The “designated panel” of gene tests refers to the fact that Navigenics initially only plans to offer customers a set of 15 to 20 genetic tests for specific, treatable diseases. That’s in the same ballpark as what existing gene-testing services like DNADirect offer now, for a one-time fee that’s roughly comparable to what Navigenics apparently plans to charge each year. (Admittedly, that assumes the company charges $2,000 to $3,000 every year, when it might actually charge a lower subscription fee after a user pays a big up-front charge for the gene scan. So far Navigenics hasn’t said, although I’ve addressed the question to DuRoss.)

Navigenics and many outside experts believe that bioethics issues and the possibility that the FDA might want to regulate this nascent field justify exactly such a paternalistic approach. Anyone interested in that argument should really read Duncan’s piece — he clearly spent a lot of time with experts worried that individuals aren’t ready to deal with limited, contradictory and often-wrong interpretations of genetic data. (Most, although not all, of such concerns strike me as overblown, since people have been making life decisions based on limited, contradictory and often wrong scientific information — nutrition studies leap immediately to mind — for as long as that information has been available.)

What’s much more interesting to me is how neatly corporate genomics yields a classic locked-in, service-business model for the likes of Navigenics. In what other field, after all, could you even imagine locking an individual into an expensive service that subsequently provides only limited access to some of his or her most personal information? (Once you’ve paid thousands of dollars to have your genome scanned at one company, you’re unlikely to want to do it again somewhere else.) Credit reports and medical records are the closest analogies that come to mind, and both are freely available to consumers upon request. I can’t help thinking that the idea of becoming a “Microsoft of the genome” — i.e., a company able to charge again and again for updated versions of the same product — may have played a big role in Navigenics’ business thinking, not to mention that of its backers.

Maybe there are enough vain, wealthy people who’d be willing to put up with all that to make Navigenics a success — it’ll be very interesting to watch. Still, I can’t help thinking that corporate genomics doesn’t sound like much fun. To see why, flip back to the beginning of Duncan’s article, where Jay Flatley is scrolling through his own gene map, provided by 23andMe. Flatley, the hefty CEO of Illumina — a 23andMe partner that will perform gene scans for the startup — chortles as he discovers he has a “sprinting gene” associated with “fast-twitch” muscles, then looks to see if he’s prone to diabetes or “restless legs syndrome.”

It’s not at all clear from the Portfolio article if 23andMe plans to give its customers the freedom to make similar searches — the company apparently didn’t talk to Duncan, and to the best of my knowledge hasn’t said elsewhere how it plans to make information available to its customers. Still, the anecdote at least suggests that 23andMe may have a broader vision than Navigenics.

Here’s how Duncan describes the company’s plans, presumably as channeled by Flatley:

When 23andMe goes live, customers will be asked to spit into short plastic tubes or to swab cells from inside their cheeks and mail in the sample. 23andMe will then analyze the data in relation to reams of information about ailments, treatments, diet, and ancestry and compare the results with those of thousands of others who have been tested for genes associated with diseases and other traits.

The cybersynthesis will be channeled into a customized DNA diary on the website. The company is considering a feature that would allow people to then link their personalized pages to those of others who share their DNA—fellow sprinters, say, or people at risk for Alzheimer’s—just as you can now link to college chums on Facebook.

Of course, the idea of sharing your DNA with others via a new online social network — GeneBook? — might seem to many people every bit as creepy as the idea of corporate genomics seems to me. So let’s hope there’s plenty of room for a variety of approaches as personal genomics evolves, and that 23andMe and Navigenics really do complement each other in this respect — at least enough to offer potential customers a real choice.

Further reading:

• Google, Genentech fund personal-genetics startup 23andMe
• Personal-genetics startup Navigenics, a competitor to Google-backed 23andMe, unstealths
• Craig Venter’s genome and our brave new world
• Personal genomics and the end of insurance
• Decoding 23andMe — Illumina spills the beans
• Complete Genomics and BioNanomatrix rev up the fast, cheap and out-of-control genome race

Things are starting to get crowded in the race to sequence entire human genomes quickly and relatively cheaply — usually meaning somewhere in the territory of $1,000 per genome, compared to the $100,000+ it costs with current technology. At least four startups have taken on the $1,000 genome challenge, two of which have already been acquired by larger companies. (See details at the end of the first item here.)

Last week, two relatively new venture-backed startups — Complete Genomics, of Menlo Park, Calif., and Philadelphia’s BioNanomatrix — considerably upped the ante in what I’ve started to think of as the “fast, cheap and out-of-control” genome race when they announced a joint venture that aims to sequence an entire human genome in eight hours for less than $100. (Technically, it appears that this figure applies only to a single set of the 23 paired chromosomes every individual carries, so a spiffy new high-resolution “diploid” genome like Craig Venter’s would presumably take more like 16 hours and cost somewhere around $200. That’s still dirt cheap, of course.)

This is, of course, some mighty big talk from companies that virtually no one had heard of until recently. (See our coverage of Complete Genomics here.) The companies still aren’t saying exactly how they hope to pull off this feat, although they’ve disclosed a bit more detail in their latest announcement. Apparently they plan to adapt a “novel DNA sequencing chemistry” (presumably from Complete Genomics) and combine it with a “linearized nanoscale DNA imaging” scheme (BioNanomatrix’s technology, it appears) in a way that allows them to read up to long DNA stretches of up to 100,000 nucleotide bases — those DNA “letters” we’re always carrying on about — at a time.

What, exactly, that means and whether it’s possible is something the experts will have to hash out. The best I can figure at the moment is that since BioNanomatrix specializes in “nanofluidics” systems — little gizmos that are essentially labs-on-a-chip at near-atomic dimensions — it might somehow be possible to snake long stretches of DNA into a tiny channel on a chip, where having the molecule laid out end-to-end might make it easier to tag and read out the bases in one fell swoop. But that’s just a guess at this point.

Another interesting element here is that these companies bluntly acknowledge the direct threat they pose to today’s genetic-testing industry. Existing genetic tests usually rely on antibodies or other probes that identify a single gene variant; newer varieties examine a handful of single-base variations that have been correlated with something like your risk of heart disease. The ability to read out an individual’s entire genome, however, would effectively demolish the need for such tests, as any the information the tests could turn up would be right there in your genome. (The same issue arises, albeit in somewhat less-dramatic form, with the SNP genome “outlines” that startups like 23andMe and Navigenics would like to provide — our coverage is here, here and here.) This is a potentially huge problem for companies like DNA Direct, one of the first consumer-oriented genetic-testing startups. Expect to see some fireworks on this front before it’s all settled.

The joint venture recently received an $8.8 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which for some reason got virtually no attention at the time but for the noble exception of the Philadelphia Business Journal.

Here’s some additional detail from the press release:

“We tried to approach this project from the perspective of the clinician, looking at the requirements and opportunities associated with incorporating genetics into routine clinical diagnostics,” said Dr. Radoje (Rade) Drmanac, chief science officer and co-founder of Complete Genomics. “Accuracy, speed and low cost were paramount considerations. While there are a number of powerful and elegant sequencing strategies available or under development, we determined that we needed a completely novel approach to overcome their inherent limitations and achieve our $100 cost objective. We are optimistic that the combination of our two highly innovative approaches has a good chance of success. ”

The joint venture has proposed adapting a novel DNA sequencing chemistry combined with linearized nanoscale DNA imaging to create a system that can “read” very long DNA sequences of greater than 100,000 bases at high speed and with accuracy exceeding the current industry standard. By condensing a wide range of genetic tests into a single, cost-effective platform, the proposed technology has the potential to enable improvements in the diagnosis and personalized treatment of a wide variety of health conditions, as well as the ability to deliver individually tailored preventive medicine. The $100 genome would also have important applications in medical research and drug development.

(UPDATED: See below.)

It’s finally all about him.

By “him,” of course, I mean J. Craig Venter, the iconoclastic scientist who had his entire genome sequenced, posted in a public database, and analyzed in a scientific paper published Monday in the online journal PLoS Biology. If for some reason you hadn’t heard, feel free to take a moment to read all about it in the NYT, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, Reuters, CNN, or any of the other 237 news outlets Google counted yesterday as having covered the story. (The number is far lower today for some reason.)

Ostensibly, all this hoopla is justified by the scientific insights into genetic diversity gleaned from Venter’s genome. These findings, however, are scientifically interesting but not exactly earth-shattering. (More below.) The sequencing has also been heralded as the beginning of a new era of “personal genomics,” although that’s exactly what some of the very same publications wrote when DNA co-discoverer James Watson received a draft sequence of his own genome back in June. (For background on personal genomics, the idea that we’ll eventually all have our genomes sequenced in order to suss out our susceptibility to various forms of disease, see this Scientific American article in PDF form.)

So yesterday’s supposed “milestone” might easily have gone largely unnoticed had the genome in question belonged to anyone but Venter, a scientist of seemingly insatiable ambition with skills and an ego to match. Venter’s genome is not only supposedly the first one to be sequenced in such detail, it may very well become the “reference genome” against which all others are measured. In other words, it’s entirely possible Venter’s genes will be with us always, a fact that isn’t likely to have escaped the man’s attention. When the NYT asked whether turning himself into humanity’s yardstick means Venter may have won the “genome race” after all, genome expert Edward Rubin demurred, saying only, “There is this long history of Craig’s vanity, which for much of the scientific community is irritating.”

Indeed. Venter, a one-time NIH researcher, was previously best known for heading up Celera Genomics in an attempt to sequence a human genome ahead of the NIH’s publicly funded Human Genome Project. That race that ended in a tie and with Venter, ironically enough, out of a job. (It also later turned out that about 60 percent of the Celera reference genome was based on Venter’s own DNA.) Venter, however, also ended up rich and has since founded his own research outfit — the modestly named J. Craig Venter Institute, which of course participated in the sequencing of its founder’s genome — and launched plans to build synthetic genomes in order to turn microbes into better biofuel producers. Next month, he’ll publish his autobiography, titled A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life. (For dueling takes on Venter, see this July Forbes article by Matthew Herper and a defense of sorts in the the last third or so of Nicholas Wade’s NYT story.)

The real significance of Venter’s genome is that it has officially kicked off a new era of “celebrity genomics” in which we’re likely to see a progression of rich and famous people pony up the $100,000 it takes to glimpse their genetic future. (See, for instance, this Globe and Mail story; there’s more in-depth discussion at two very good genetics blogs here and here.) Various poobahs including Stephen Hawking, Paul Allen, Michael Milken, Larry King and Larry Page have already expressed interest in being sequenced. The first ten volunteers for Harvard geneticist George Church’s Personal Genome Project also generally appear to be pretty well-off, even if many are largely unknown outside of their respective fields.

Although many scientists appear alarmed about this development, I’m not exactly sure what all the fuss is about. The reason is simple: In this particular instance, the well-heeled make far better guinea pigs than the rest of us. For instance, it’s highly unlikely that they’d lose their jobs, healthcare or spouses if bad news pops up in their genes. They’ll also have the resources to wrestle with the ramifications of actually knowing what their genome foretells about their health and their likelihood of living to a ripe old age. And, of course, the rest of us will be watching and learning, because isn’t that what we do with celebrities?

That’s particularly important because “celebrity genomics” is almost certain to be a short-lived phenomenon. Sequencing costs are falling so rapidly that some enthusiasts believe it might cost only $1,000 to decode a genome within five years, at which point most anyone with the cash and the gumption can join the genomics club. Two startups already aim to help democratize access to genomic information, and more are probably waiting in the wings (see our coverage of 23andMe and Navigenics for details). About the worst thing you could say is that people inclined to mimic the rich and famous might want to get their genomes sequenced too, heedless of the potential consequences — not an inconsequential concern, but not exactly a disaster-in-waiting, either.

Whether or not the widespread availability of genetic information is likely to be a good thing, a bad thing, or just something we’ll all have to get used to is a subject for future posts. For the moment, I’ll just leave you with this thought: Some visionaries (or dystopians, if you prefer) are convinced that this train has already left the station, and that ultimately we’ll all end up sequencing and widely sharing our genomic information. Welcome to our brave new world.

Now, back to the science for a moment. The PLoS paper reports that Venter’s full genome provides a new picture of exactly how much humans differ from each other genetically. Recall that the two reference genomes published back in 2001 didn’t represent single individuals, but were pastiches of DNA from several people (Venter included, of course). What’s more, researchers blended those individual contributions into a single stretch of three billion DNA “letters” roughly equivalent to the 23 chromosomes you might inherit from either your mother or your father. Venter’s sequenced genome, by contrast, not only represents a single, unique person, it also fleshes out all 23 pairs of chromosomes. Such a “diploid genome” contains six billion DNA letters, and can illuminate the variation among each set of inherited genes while also showing how those genes pair up to create a variety of inherited traits.

As I mentioned above, what that shows is certainly interesting, at least to scientists. It turns out, for instance, that parental genes once thought to come in matched pairs can actually be wildly mismatched, with one inherited version facing off against two or three copies — or none at all — from the other parent. Venter’s genome also revealed a somewhat greater-than-previously-thought number of major variations within chromosomes, including missing genes, multiple copies of single genes, and so forth. (To be fair, other research teams were already working toward these findings using less-detailed genomic maps).

On the other hand, it’s something of a yawn for the average person. Consider the bottom line: We may share only about 99.5 percent of our DNA with other people, instead of the 99.9 percent that many scientists estimated several years back. Stop the presses.

UPDATE: Good news, everybody. J. Craig Venter is now blogging about his own genome, courtesy of CNN.

Navigenics, a new secretive Silicon Valley company, wants to let you access your genetic information, so you can see what sort of diseases or sicknesses you may be prone to. It has backing from high-profile venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.

It joins another company, 23andMe, doing something very similar — each exploiting the abundance of information available about the human genome, so that regular people can find information about themselves that they’ve never had before.

David Hamilton, over at VentureBeat LifeSciences, has the scoop, and more details. The Redwood Shores company has just unveiled its Web site, offering only rudimentary information.

It will obtain your genetic information by sending you “saliva collection kit” —you’ll spit into a cup and mail it to the company — and it will send it back to you after scan it for your genetic details, and help you “navigate” through what ti means.

This comes at a time when Google is about to launch Google Health, a service that lets you track your personal health information online. Navigenics’ backers, Kleiner and Sequoia, are also the two firms that backed Google. Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, who sits on Google’s board, also sits on Navigenics’ board. The Web of relationships is complex, itself worthy of a DNA anlysis :) Also sitting on Google’s board is Arthur D. Levinson, the chief executive of Genentech. Both Genentech and Google have invested in 23andMe. 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Health Evolution Partners, a private-equity fund, has also apparently invested in Navigenics.

(UPDATED: See below.)

Navigenics, a new personal genetics startup with some serious backing, threw back the curtain over the weekend by unveiling its Web site. The Redwood Shores, Calif., startup says it aims to provide individuals with their genetic profiles and then to “arm” them with ways to improve their future heath.

This is very similar to what 23andMe, a similar startup backed by Google and Genentech (see our coverage here and here), intends to do. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Navigenics has some influential supporters of its own, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. KP’s uber-VC John Doerr also has a seat on its board. KP, of course, was an early backer of Google, whose co-founder Sergey Brin just happens to be married to 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki.

Navigenics isn’t anywhere near so shy as 23andMe, which remains largely mum despite some fairly significant disclosures by its investors. From the Navigenics Web site:

Thanks to advances in genomic research, medicine and technology, we can now determine your genetic predisposition for certain diseases, perhaps years or decades before they develop. These insights enable you to take action before a disorder strikes to delay or even prevent the illness altogether.

In other words, Navigenics essentially intends to get people to have their genomes scanned in a rough-and-ready fashion — in other words, they’ll scan your genes with chips that look for single-letter variations in the genetic code, instead of laboriously reading it out letter by letter — and then to match up what they find with the latest information on the diseases to which your genes might predispose you. Navigenics so far seems focused on the question of what your genes might say about disease, whereas 23andMe is apparently also interested in helping people trace their genealogy and creating social networks where they can compare and contrast their genetics.

Needless to say, the privacy implications of all this activity are fairly profound, and neither company has come close to explaining exactly how it plans to protect users’ privacy. That’s a particular concern given that existing online services can be forced to divulge your personal information to the government without even informing you of the fact.

It’s also not clear how long this will take or what it will cost. According to a video on its site, Navigenics says will obtain your genetic information via a “saliva collection kit” — i.e., you’ll spit into a cup and mail it to the company, which will scan it for your genetic details and then presumably post them online where you can look at them. Navigenics also plans to provide users with information that can help them make the best of their genetic predispositions, although exactly how that will work in practice remains to be seen.

At the very least, though, it’s clear Navigenics has come loaded for bear. In addition to the blue-chip VC backing — there’s no information on their Web site as to how much money the company has raised, and so far we haven’t heard back from anyone involved with the company — Navigenics boasts some heavy hitters among its board members, co-founders and partners. For instance, David Brailer, until recently the Bush administration’s point man on electronic health records and more recently chairman of Health Evolution Partners, a private-equity fund that invests in healthcare, sits on the board. So do the company’s co-founders, Dietrich Stephan, a director at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, and David Agus, a protein-biomarker researcher at Cedars-Sinai Medical Hospital in Los Angeles. The company has also lined up some important advisors, including the politically connected Greg Simon, now president of Michael Milken’s FasterCures organization and previously Al Gore’s chief domestic policy adviser.

Navigenics also boasts close ties to Affymetrix, the big gene-chip maker — Affy’s former associate general counsel Stephen Moore will be Navigenics’ general counsel, and Affy founder Stephen Fodor appears in a video on Navigenics’ site, so it’s not too difficult to conclude that the company will be using Affy’s gene chips to sift users’ genetic info. (23andMe, by contrast, was recently reported to have signed a deal with Affy competitor Illumina.) The company has also hired David Ansley, former science editor at Consumer Reports, to run “editorial” (presumably the section providing scientific info about genetic links to disease that customers will be anxious to find), and Amy DuRoss, late of California’s Proposition 71 stem-cell initiative and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, as head of policy and “business affairs.” (DuRoss is also apparently Navigenics’ spokeswoman.) The company has also hired Colleen Yoo, formerly e-business director for Blue Shield of California and director of product management for WebMD, as head of product management.

Which is not to say the company doesn’t have a few discordant notes, starting with CEO Mari Baker, recently a KP “executive in residence