Behind 23andMe’s Venture into Drug Development ｜ Fortune

Chris just raised $115 million in new funding. Tell me a little bit about what you're planning to use that money for. So a big part of that was the relaunch plans and making sure that we can market again, that we've continued to grow. We're up to 250 people in the company. We're still growing pretty aggressively. As well as we launched a new therapeutics initiative where we are now looking at all of the customer data that we have and seeing can we glean insights that can actually potentially help us develop therapeutics in a completely different, much faster, more efficient way. So are you becoming a drug company? Is that what I'm hearing? So it's, you know, people always ask. For me the vision of 23andMe has not changed since day one and it was all about how can we improve health care. And I do believe that one of the fundamental ways you can improve health care is by one, you being in charge of your own information and actually taking control of it. And two, that if we actually have tons and tons of data. And the reality is that people do get sick and the groups of companies that are making therapeutics are the pharma companies. But when you look at the pharma statistics, every single year for the last few decades it becomes more inefficient and more expensive to make a therapeutic. So my hope here is that 23andMe will be part of that solution for change. Can we actually make therapeutics in a much faster, more efficient way? And can we do that in partnership with all of our customers? And I think that's one of the things that's really innovative and unusual about 23andMe is that we are a true partnership with our customers. Like we have a customer offering and people sign up and they get it. And we want to, you know, create value so that we can then return that back to our customers. Is there any interest in the pharmaceutical companies on actually accessing some of this data that you have? Because it is pretty massive. Yeah, we do a lot of partnerships with pharma companies. We never give away individual level information, but we do information on aggregate. And part of my hope here with the company is that we can help drive efficiencies and make research happen faster for everybody. So obviously we want to do it ourselves, but we want to, you know, we do a ton of programs for free for academics. We do a ton of partnerships with pharma companies because I think, you know, we've heard from customers who have diseases who, you know, who have family members who have diseases and they come to us and they say if there's anything that I can do to participate in research or move the needle forward, I want to do it. So we always think about that with the lens of our customer in terms of, like, a Parkinson's patient. What is it that they would want to have happen with their data? And overwhelmingly we hear from them, like, we want to actually improve the state of their health and we want to actually better understand the disease. And so that's where we really have, like, I see ourselves really as that bridge between consumers' interests and what they want in disease and what, how the pharma world is working and actually making sure that consumers actually can have more and more of a voice in the types of research that's going on in the world.