Regeneron is to pay $256 million in cash to acquire “substantially all” of 23andMe’s assets, including its massive biobank of around 15 million customer genetic samples and data.

  • bblkargonaut@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I honestly don’t know what they will do with snp data. These investors and VCs have been running scare peace articles for the last two years to drive the company into bankruptcy so that it could be sold and the data harvested. But I honestly think people are really overestimating the value of a dataset showing how different people are from a standard template. It’s good for ancestry and correlations but people forget they didn’t fully sequence samples. I fully expect the news cycle to change once they figure this out as they try to get people to resubmit DNA for nextgen sequencing, so they can try to salvage their investment.

      • bblkargonaut@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        You’d be surprised how much money gets wasted of stupid projects and acquisitions in biotech because some suit think they understand science better than their R&D team. For analogy sake think about all the stupid shit Microsoft bought and killed or all the chat apps Google created and killed, this going to be Regeneron’s Skype.

        • TheRedSpade@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          this going to be Regeneron’s Skype.

          Microsoft didn’t kill Skype. Zoom popped up out of nowhere and killed Skype.

          • bblkargonaut@lemmy.world
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            21 hours ago

            In the before times we used hamachi, but it was hard. Eventually, Skype was born and it was good and easy. It worked like a phone and many StarCraft 2 team games were won. But Skype was corrupted by the many Nigerian princes and hot Ladies who only needed a few dollars to turn your life around. This corruption was then baked so deeply into windows it took registry edits to exorcise it. But all was good was we now had discord which took the ideas of hamachi and Skype and delived a better experience than both.

            • primalmotion@lemmy.ml
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              10 hours ago

              Ah. You think Discord, that is not an free software product, controlled by one corpo, is immune to enshitification. When will people learn?

              • bblkargonaut@lemmy.world
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                10 hours ago

                Definitely not, enshitification is real. I’ve gone from someone excited about new products to I don’t trust anything that I didn’t build. We are currently discussing moving our group chat off discord, but I’m biochemist and my circle are similar professions and I’m still learning how to properly host things.

    • Zenith@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      I think it’s weird you’ve made the assumption these professionals buying this haven’t already considered the things you’ve said… like that’s all looked at during the acquisition process

    • Bravo@eviltoast.org
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      1 day ago

      I’ve not submitted my DNA to any genealogy sites for testing, but what annoys me about all this is that in order to get as much info about my family tree as possible (for posterity and confirming theorized connections) I SHOULD be testing my parents’s DNA because the oldest family members are the best for connecting to distant relatives, and my parents aren’t gonna live forever. But I can’t get them (or myself) tested, because of considerations like this. This shouldn’t have to be a consideration. But it is, because of greedy bastards and the gombeen politicians who allow stuff like this to be legal.

      • bblkargonaut@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        If you really want to get your parents sequenced for your own personal use without it going into a database it’ll cost you about $500 per sample (cheaper if you know someone who can extract the DNA for you). You’ll get a set of fastq files for the reads that will cover almost their entire genome that you can then use with public databases or just store for future use. Another option is to sign up for a university study but you’ll have to be comfortable with their data use.