SAN FRANCISCO – If you’ve ever spit into a DNA collection tube – and consented to have your sample donated to science – your data could be used by a pharmaceutical company to develop new drugs. And that disclosure is worrying some consumers who were unaware that their DNA data would be shared that way.
On Tuesday, 23andMe, Ancestry.com and other companies addressed those concerns by pledging to disclose when they hand over that sensitive information to other companies or law enforcement.
Under the new guidelines, 23andMe, Ancestry, Helix, MyHeritage and Habit say they will obtain consent from consumers before sharing DNA data with businesses and other third parties, and they will disclose to the public each year requests from law enforcement to access DNA data.
This article highlights the scope for developing therapeutics with new innovative, alternative approaches. The current trillion dollars pharmaceutical industry is in peril where the current drug development pipeline is slow, inefficient and incapable of being extended to multi-combination drug therapies as well as minimally focused on prevention. The complex modeling of diseases and biological functions has been limited because of the inability to integrate large scale molecular pathways.
Watch this Video to understand how recent advances provide breakthrough technology for doing scalable modeling of complex molecular systems to dramatically accelerate drug discovery and development.