Today I got an email from 23andMe that they’d hit the 2 million customer mark. Since they reached their goal of 1 million kits purchased the company seems to have taken its foot off the pedal of customer base growth to focus on other things (in particular, how to get phenotypic data from those who have been genotyped). In contrast Ancestry has been growing at a faster rate of late. After talking to Spencer Wells (who was there at the beginning of the birth of this sector) we estimated that the direct-to-consumer genotyping kit business is now north of 5 million individuals served. Probably closer to 6 or 7 million, depending on the numbers you assume for the various companies (I’m counting autosomal only).
This pretty awesome. Each of these firm’s genotype in the range of 100,000 to 1 million variant markers, or single nucleotide base pairs. 20 years ago this would have been an incredible achievement, but today we’re all excited about long-read sequencing from Oxford Nanopore. SNP-chips are almost ho-hum.
But though sequencing is the cutting edge, the final frontier and terminal technology of reading your DNA code, genotyping in humans will be around for a while because of cost. At ASHG last year a medical geneticist was claiming price points in bulk for high density SNP-chips are in the range of the low tens of dollars per unit. A good high coverage genome sequence is still many times more expensive (perhaps an order of magnitude ore more depending on who you believe). It also can impose more data processing costs than a SNP-chip in my experience.
Here’s a slide from Spencer:
This is a slide I’ve used in presentations in the past – needs to be updated w/ current numbers, but the discussion is around the inflection pic.twitter.com/Vj9XNb4Exq
— Spencer Wells (@spwells) June 12, 2017
I suspect genotyping will go S-shaped before 2025 after explosive growth in genotyping. Some people will opt-out. A minority of the population, but a substantial proportion. At the other extreme of the preference distribution you will have those who will start getting sequenced. Researchers will begin talk about genotyping platforms like they talk about microarrays (yes, I know at places like the Broad they already talk about genotyping like that, but we can’t all be like the Broad!).
Here’s an article from 2007 on 23andMe in Wired. They’re excited about paying $1,000 genotyping services…the cost now of the cheapest high quality (30x) whole genome sequences. Though 23andMe has a higher price point for its medical services, many of the companies are pushing their genotyping+ancestry below $100, a value it had stabilized at for a few years. Family Tree DNA has a father’s day sale for $69 right now. Ancestry looks to be $79. The Israel company MyHeritage is also pushing a $69 sale price (the CSO there is advertising that he’s hiring human geneticists, just so you know). It seems very likely that a $50 price point is within site in the next few years as SNP-chip costs become trivial and all the expenses are on the data storage/processing and visualization costs. I think psychologically for many people paying $50 is not cheap, but it is definitely not expensive. $100 feels expensive.
Ultimately I do wonder if I was a bit too optimistic that 50% of the US population will be sequenced at 30x by 2025. But the dynamic is quite likely to change rapidly because of a technological shift as the sector goes through a productivity uptick. We’re talking about exponential growth, which humans have weak intuition about….
Addendum: Go into the archives of Genomes Unzipped and reach the older posts. Those guys knew where we were heading…and we’re pretty much there.