GenomeQuest could have targeted consumers, the largest available market for its technology. When we entered the market in 2004, the consumer wave was a distant vision, not even on the horizon. How did we survive? We targeted the smallest segment we could find: Information Scientists and Biotech Patent Lawyers. Why? My father was a old-school football coach who taught from the Vince Lombardi book: You take what the defense give you. In our case consumers, though there are many of them will pay the least for information linked to genomes, whereas commercial clients value the information highly because the results we deliver are actionable: Pursue this target. License this target. Kill this research program.
In contrast, as the New York Times article Consumers Slow to Embrace the Age of Genomics discusses, consumer genomic information is not actionable.
Early on during our evolution I was influenced by an interview with Meg Whitman, then CEO of eBay who said there were 5 things people want to do on the Internet: Find, Buy, Pay, Share, and be Entertained. For now, Consumer Genomics is an entertainment business.
When will it become more than entertainment? When researchers have created the association databases with enough statistical quality to make the associations meaningful.
Right now, we see a big market for providing Sequence Data Management for discovery and clinical research applications, where the results of searches is actionable, and therefore more valued by our customers. These many hundreds of thousands of researchers will lead us to millions of doctors and in the future, billions of consumers.
Additional blog posts on the NY Time article:
Gene Expression: Personal genomics is dead, long live personal genomics
Genomics Law Report: The New York Times versus Personal Genomics: Much Ado About Not Very Much
