{"cache":{"posts_f30bc_605b7":{"__typename":"RootQueryToPostConnection","nodes":[{"__typename":"Post","id":"cG9zdDoxMDc5MQ==","categories_3cd3e_bf21a":{"__typename":"PostToCategoryConnection","edges":[{"__typename":"PostToCategoryConnectionEdge","node":{"__typename":"Category","id":"dGVybTo5","slug":"news","name":"News","uri":"/category/news","seo":{"__typename":"TaxonomySEO","title":"News Archives - 23andMe Blog","opengraphTitle":"News Archives","metaDesc":"23andMe News are blog post where our research or innovative products have pushed new boundaries that are worth sharing and make news.","opengraphDescription":"23andMe News are blog post where our research or innovative products have pushed new boundaries that are worth sharing and make news.","fullHead":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"}}}]},"uri":"/articles/an-update-to-23andme-customers","content_b28e9_bf21a":"

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From 23andMe co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki

23andMe Community,

Let me begin by acknowledging that there are many things we could have done better over the years and there are especially things we could have done better with this recent incident involving the changes to our subscription. We admit that we make mistakes. We will continue to make mistakes. I can personally promise you that we will try to listen more and do better. Dedicating resources to our ancestry product and improving our customer service are top priorities for 2012. We hear you loud and clear and we will be making changes.

There has been significant internal confusion about what was promised to our customers at the end of their subscriptions. I understand that to many of you there was no “confusion.” For this, I sincerely apologize. We will always try to live up to what we promise — now and in the future. We want your respect, we want you to be part of our community, and we want you to be part of the fabulous genetic journey before us.

23andMe was built on a passion for genetic research. We believe we are playing an integral part in shaping the future of genetic research and, importantly, making certain the public has unrestricted access to this valuable and potentially life-changing information at a very affordable price. Such ambitions have come with a great deal of resistance. We are committed to the cause. You, the community, have supported us and helped us through these tough times. The one group we never imagined as an adversary is our community members. Sadly, but deservedly, it seems we managed to turn some of our most valuable supporters into adversaries. For this I apologize.

Many have said we’re making changes solely for financial reasons. This is only partially true. The reality is that the external resistance, the ongoing research, and product development are expensive. We’re not “selling out” and we’re not flexible in our mission or values. We will continue to develop the best products out there at an affordable price. But we are not profitable yet and we need to continue to develop our business model. We are in this for the long haul. We will make mistakes again. But we will always try to do the right thing and prove to you that we are worth your hard earned dollars.

We have been searching for a solution that will enable us to make good on our promises to you and also enable 23andMe to continue to move forward with our plans of creating the best health and ancestry experience out there. Going forward:

No changes will be made to any accounts until July 31, 2012. If your subscription is set to expire before then, you will continue to receive updates and will not be charged for the additional time. For those who have continued commitments, those will continue. After July 31, 2012, if your account has met it’s commitments, you will have the option of subscribing, buying a Lifetime subscription or canceling your subscription.
Over the next six months 23andMe is putting substantial resources into Ancestry. By end of July, we will create an experience for non-subscribing customers as well as subscribing customers. Non-subscribing customers will have access to the health reports, Relative Finder matches and other ancestry tools that existed while they were subscribing. They will not get access to new or updated reports, new or updated relative finder matches or new features. We are acknowledging now that we have plans to improve and iterate on our ancestry features and that the way the data is presented will likely change. The fundamental data should remain accessible but exactly how it looks and in what features it appears, will likely change.
Customers will not be removed from the Relative Finder database unless they specifically opt out. The 23andMe team is working on creating an experience where subscribing customers will be able to find relatives among subscribers and non-subscribers (assuming they have not opted out). The exact details are still to be determined. Be assured that we understand that Relative Finder is an extremely important feature and we are working hard to make sure we give you the best possible experience.
We will be engaging with leaders from the ancestry community to do our best to create products that meet your needs. CeCe Moore will be leading this initiative with us and we will look to engage many more of you.
For customers who purchased a subscription before 12/21/11, you will have the opportunity to upgrade to a Lifetime subscription for $99 for 30 days after you have met your commitment. If you had already completed your commitment by 7/31/12, you will have until 8/30/12 to purchase the Lifetime upgrade for $99. Upgrades to Lifetime subscription are normally $299. A Lifetime subscription will enable you to retain full access to all the data and tools for the life of the v3 product. We have no immediate plans for v4 and we always try to do as much as we can to make all our features work on all our platforms. v2 customers still have the majority of our functionality.
For customers who have more than three profiles in one account, we recognize the subscription fees can cause financial pain. We hear the concerns and need more time to find the right solution. We will be talking with CeCe Moore and other active community members to find the right solution for those with more than three profiles.
If you originally opted to store your sample with us, and you later cancel your subscription, your stored sample may be discarded.
If you choose to cancel, you will be able to download your Raw Data but will not be able to use the Browse Raw Data feature.

The 23andMe team has doubled in size in 2011 and is running full speed making changes, developing new tools and improving the service. Ancestry will be a significant focus for us in 2012. You should expect to see more labs, significant improvements to many of the ancestry services and some new ancestry-related features.

I want to apologize again for the poor communication and the loss of trust. Customers are the core of our business and we will work hard to win you back. We will also work hard to learn from this mistake and make sure we better engage our community in our product development and before we make changes. We are also committing to putting substantial improvements into customer service so we can have an outstanding customer service experience and give you an easy way to communicate with us. We promise 2012 will be an exciting product year.

Anne

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(23andMe customers may comment here.)

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It was a great honor to learn yesterday that the 23andMe Personal Genome Serviceâ„¢ has been named TIME Magazine’s 2008 Invention of the Year. Today the Blog would like to acknowledge several 23andMe partners who contributed to the innovation behind our service.

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We’d like to extend our thanks to Illumina, Inc., DNA Genotek, Inc., and LabCorp, and especially to everybody at those companies who shared their ideas, expertise and hard work.

DNA Genotek produces the collection system our customers use to collect their saliva samples and ship them to our contracted laboratory. The caps, container and funnel are functional and easy to use.
Illumina is behind the technology we use to generate our customers’ genetic data. The Illumina Human Hap550+ is a customizable DNA array that allows us to determine an individual’s genetic signature at nearly 600,000 locations on all 23 pairs of chromosomes, plus the mitochondrial DNA. Because Illumina’s technology lets our scientists select thousands of specific locations in the genome that they want to probe, we think it is the best genotyping platform for personalized genetics.
Labcorp is the company that brings the Spit Kit and the Human Hap550+ together. Their laboratory technicians extract DNA from our customers’ saliva, then run it through Illumina arrays to produce the basic genetic data we use as the starting point for our Personal Genome Service. As a CLIA-certified laboratory with extensive experience in all types of medical diagnostic testing, Labcorp assures our customers genetic data of the utmost accuracy and quality.

A big thanks to all who help make our Personal Genome Service possible – including our partners, scientific advisors, investors, team members and customers. We hope everyone is as excited as we are to see not just our service recognized, but also our shared vision of personal genomics for all.

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Editor’s Note: This week TIME Magazine is naming the 23andMe Personal Genome Service, its Invention of the Year, an honor that the publication has previously bestowed on innovations such as the iPhone and YouTube. This post by Director of Products Alex Wong (back row, second from right) offers a glimpse at how 23andMe came to be, and what makes it such a powerful tool for exploring your DNA.

We’re thrilled that our product has been named TIME Magazine’s 2008 Invention of the Year. But what exactly did we invent? To answer that question, let’s to go back to the early days of 23andMe … .

I first met our co-founders Anne and Linda, together with Serge and Brian, our first two employees, in the summer of 2006 at a bakery in downtown Palo Alto, Calif.. As they were explaining the basic concept behind the company, Linda reached into her bag and pulled out a CD with “Aveys” written on it in magic marker.

“What’s that?”, I asked.

Her reply: “It’s my family’s genomes!”

That’s a first, I thought to myself – pulling genomes from a handbag. I was hooked. I knew I wanted to join 23andMe and help make this possible for everyone and their family.

But we had a long way to go. DNA chip technology was still fairly new, something that only researchers had access to. Linda, having worked at a DNA chip company, was able to get her own family genotyped. But unless you had an in at a research lab or one of these companies, getting your own genome just was not possible. Even if you did manage to get the genomes of you and yours on a CD, all you’d find when you looked at it would be a bunch of giant, indecipherable text files filled with “rs” numbers and A’s and B’s. These are the raw data files of SNP information that the DNA chip analysis produces.

How to make sense of all that data? The good news was that years of research, starting with the Human Genome Project and the International HapMap Project, had produced a wealth of publicly available information about human genetics. The bad news was, it was all locked inside databases designed by researchers, for researchers. Want to know what one of your SNPs means? A logical place to start, you would think, would be dbSNP, a massive database of SNPs run by the National Institutes of Health.

Good luck. Assuming you can wade through its dense user interface, make sure you get your alignment, genome build, major and minor alleles, orientation, and stranding right, or you’re liable to get your interpretation backwards and think you’re supposed to have wet earwax when you really have dry! Don’t know what stranding, genome builds, or any of those other things are? Trust me, you’d rather not.

Not only did these government and academic databases sport slow and unfriendly user interfaces, but some of them also had data quality and consistency problems and few of them were linked together.

So it was going to require more than just building a website to make all the fruits of ongoing genetic research accessible, useful, and compelling to regular people like you and me. We had to create a whole architecture and process for cleaning up, aggregating and integrating all of this human genetic information, combining it with an individual’s own genotype data, running comparisons and algorithms on it, blending it with great educational content, and serving it back to our customers through a friendly user interface – all in under 500 milliseconds, which is how long you have before people start to complain that your website is slow.

On top of that, we wanted personal genetics to be social, so our customers could see their genetic data in context and learn about what makes us all different and similar at the same time. That meant building in the ability for customers to share their data with family or friends without sacrificing privacy or security.

It’s taken the combined talents of all the different kinds of people we have at our company, from bioinformaticians, to engineers, to writers, to UI designers, but we’re all so excited about having made it possible in 2008 for anyone with $399 to explore their own genome.

Of course, if you’d like to rock it 2006-style, you can still get your own gigantic text file full of SNPs using our Download Your Raw Data feature. You can even burn it onto a CD and stick it in your handbag!

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23andMe is always looking for ways not just to give our customers more data, but to help them better understand their genetic information and what it means for them. This week, we’re introducing a new way to look at Health and Traits data that does just that by pinpointing for each person the particular topics they are likely to find most important. We expect this new approach to become especially valuable as the amount of information provided by our Personal Genome Service continues to grow.

This is what the new view looks like:

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The Clinical Reports page (above) shows topics containing information that is both supported by solid scientific evidence and has the potential to make a real difference in terms of your disease risk or odds of having a particular trait. There are four different sections within Clinical Reports:

Disease Risks shows you the currently covered health conditions for which your risk is most elevated.
Carrier Status tells you whether you have one or more of the disease-causing mutations we cover.
Traits tells you what your genes indicate with regard to a number of physical attributes, from earwax consistency to malaria resistance.
New and Recently Updated is just that – a list of our newest and most recently updated Health and Traits topics.

The second page of the dashboard contains a list of Research Reports. These contain information that either has not yet been scientifically validated or has been. However they don’t have a substantial influence on your odds of having a disease or trait. On the left side of the list there are colored dots that indicate what effect, if any, your data have on your genetic risk of disease.

Here’s what the Research Reports page looks like:

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The new Health and Traits dashboard isn’t intended to give you all of your information on a single page. You still need to look at the individual reports to see what they contain. But as the number of diseases, conditions and traits we cover continues to grow, we hope it will help our customers find the ones that are of greatest interest to them!

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Personal Genome Service

An Update to 23andMe Customers

TIME to Thank Our Friends

Creating the Invention of the Year: A Look Behind the Scenes

A New Way to View Your Data

Stay in the know.