What You’re Doing Is Rather Desperate

Notes from the life of a bioinformatics researcher

Posts Tagged ‘personalised medicine

Google Health Live

with 2 comments

The much-vaunted Google Health is online.

There’s a good early review at TechCrunch. Expect further coverage from bloggers who cover personalised medicine issues; you know who they are.

Questions that occur to me are: (1) how much personal information do you need to enter for the service to be useful; (2) how much will users be willing to enter? This will be a real test of the degree to which people trust Google with personal information.

Written by nsaunders

May 20, 2008 at 11:12 am

Google Health – almost here?

without comments

Via Techmeme – Google Health Login Page.

Here’s the Google Health site – a brief summary of features, but you can’t login yet.

Written by nsaunders

January 24, 2008 at 12:48 pm

From hype to reality, just like that

with 9 comments

If you’ve been wondering whether personalised genomics startup 23andMe were for real, the wait is over. Details of their service are now available. Simply pay USD 999, spit in a tube and mail it to them (in the US only so far) and they promise a personal web-based genome browser with information about disease susceptibility, ancestry and (if your relatives join in), genealogy. The technology used is SNP genotyping – basically DNA is amplified from your sample and hybridised to an Illumina array, generating ~ 600 000 data points. All the details are available here.

Some reactions (first 2 articles by people who have trialled the service):

So there you go – we talk about the hype, the technical difficulties, the ethical/legal issues and then someone just goes and does it. I suspect that increasingly, this is how the future will unfold. Shall we lay bets on the year of the first cloned human?

Written by nsaunders

November 18, 2007 at 5:36 pm