The privacy policy [0] suggests they're not selling personal information, and they make it easy for you to protect your information too. They do keep it for internal analyses and (maybe?) marketing purposes, but suggest that you can just ask them not to, and they won't.
> You may withdraw your consent to participate in Dante Labs Research at any time by contacting Dante Labs at the email address: contact@dantelabs.com. Dante Labs will not include your Genetic Information or Self-Reported Information in studies that start more than 30 days after you withdraw (it may take up to 30 days to withdraw your information after you withdraw your consent). Any research involving your data that has already been performed or published prior to your withdrawal from Dante Labs Research will not be reversed, undone, or withdrawn.
Dante Labs will not sell, lease, or rent your individual-level information to any third party or to a third party for research purposes without your explicit consent.
So they will sell your data unless you specifically look for, find, and check the opt out. What happens to your data after that is out of Dante Labs control, so any other assurances they make are irrelevant.
Are you just assuming there's a deceptive opt-out? They explicitly say they're GDPR compliant and will not share your info without explicit consent. It's a strong claim that they're actually lying and non-compliant, without any evidence.
My assumption, since this promo is for a few days only, is that it's like any sale; they're doing it to build their brand and attract new customers.
According to GDPR, in case 1 they can transfer the data to the acquiring entity only if they are GDPR compliant too, and in case 2 all data sharing must be opt-in, not opt-out, so they can’t increase the scope of sharing without notice and affirmative consent.
They use sequencing tech from Complete Genomics[0]. Which in turn is owned by China based BGI. The tech is the brainchild of Dr Drmanac[1]. Note that the $200 price tag is for one of those Whole Genome Sequencing with lots (i.e. 1 error per million base pairs) of alpha and beta errors. A "perfect" sequence is waaaay more expensive.
Interestingly they say Q20 >90%, Q30 >80%, on 100bp reads.
That’s much higher than I’ve seen reported for prior Complete/BGI datasets. Recently lower error rates have been reported, but I’m surprised to see them this low.
If this is true, it’s comparable to the error rates on Illuminas older instruments (the GA1s and 2s at least, if not Hiseqs).
Q20 is one error in 100. Q30, one error in 1000. I think Illumina average error rate (Novaseq) is >Q30 now.
Veritas Genetics were also offering a 200USD genome a while back. I think that was Illumina sequencing, but it was a very limited time offer.
Why would it not be possible? Considering how quickly the price has been falling [0], I would assume the price to be fairly close to $200-$300 by this point. Some are even targeting $100 soon [1]. It's also worth noting that this is an extreme sale, so they may be running at a loss or no profit, mostly for brand building. I definitely hadn't heard of them before today.
Yeah... it unfortunately doesn't work like that. Illumina is notorious for glossing over many of the finer points around how they get to the fictitious numbers they claim. What they don't point out are all of the reagents, prep kits, overhead, lab costs, labor costs, software costs, pipettes, etc.
The only way this company stays alive without significant venture funding (which it appears they don't have) is through partnering with pharmas. From reading their privacy policy, it looks like they are de-identifying genotypic and phenotypic data from users. This, at scale, creates a nice population based genetics study so that if I'm a pharma, I can look at a specific biomarker and all data associated with it. That helps me build drugs against certain genes, diseases, etc.
So yes, you are the still the product and yes, your data is being resold.
There is nothing that identifies a person more precisely than their genome. It is, after all, unique to each person.
That means that by definition, anonymizing genomes is impossible. If someone tells you they will 'anonymize' your genome data, run away, they don't know what they are doing.
Their overall gross margin is >60%. I suspect that instrument margins are actually also quite high, but they factor in R&D spending on instrument costs.
However, Dante labs appear to be using BGI, not Illumina for sequencing.
They don't have their own labs based on how they phrased it within their About Us section. Given that + the turnaround time I'm seeing on the web, I'm willing to bet they outsource this to universities who have sequencer downtown.
Also, in their About Us section they have every technology listed under the sun (Illumina, PacBio, Thermo, BGI) so I think it's just whatever they can get their hands on based on which labs have open runs. Seems quite questionable from a data integrity perspective if you're trying to do population based genetics. The quality between sequencers varies dramatically.
Given the error rates shown for this product it seems unlikely this is anything but BGI sequencing.
The BGI (MGI) have been pushing out new instruments, reportedly with lower error rates (and much cheaper than Illumina).
They’ve also been building out service centers outside China, and I suspect this is where the sequencing being done by this service is located.
Universities do sometimes offer sequencing as a service, but I suspect not at as low a price point as the BGI, even for those universities with attached genome centers.
We go up against universities all the time in our competitive deals. They're generally always cheaper since everything is subsidized however the turnaround times are usually significant and the quality is not entirely repeatable. The cost here looks heavily subsidized just as a way to spark interest.
Real numbers for Illumina sequencing currently hover at around 600 USD per 30x coverage human WGS (and this is pure sequencing cost, excluding data storage and analysis). Prices are not dropping since Illumina has no real incentive at the moment. That said, Dante Labs is using a competitor (BGI) who claims to be doing cheaper sequencing (at reduced quality).
Even so, Dante is currently definitely operating at a loss. That’s not a problem though since their business model probably isn’t really consumer genetics. Likely, their actual business model (like that of every major player in the field) is gathering large panels of sequence data to either analyse themselves (and then sell the insight to pharmaceutical companies) or to sell (pseudonymised or aggregate) access to companies. So, in reality, they are preparing large-scale biomedical studies. And not only are they not paying study participants (their ostensible “customers”), they are actually getting the study participants to pay for their participation.
(Note that there’s nothing necessarily nefarious about this whole business. It just explains why they can offer their product to consumers “at a loss”. In reality it’s simply an investment.)
>As others have said, the real issue is how they get all the way down to $200.
Wasn't Dubai trying to collect DNA on every citizen and visitor to their country?
Not saying this company is in anyway connected to Dubai but there are any number of reasons why a company might want to amass a large sampling of DNA and, although not a lawyer, I can think of some plausible ways to use that data too.
If they burn through any VC money they have amassing a database, then file bankruptcy or sell off their assets to satisfy debts before dissolving... "hey other company, that's totally not us or our investors, we gotta pay our taxes so we can dissolve, wanna buy some genomes wink wink?"
They’re not. They are using BGI’s MGISEQ2000 machines. They simply sell the sequencing at a price that doesn’t cover its cost. Both because this is a promotion and because they retain the rights to using your genomic data in research: it’s simply a cheap way for them to get samples.
Is there anything more to it than carving a piece of silica and ligating the adapters to the surface? I mean, I know the process is a bit more involved than that but the patents make it seem relatively straightforward.
It's straightforward in a conceptual sense, but as with most things there are a ton of gotchas and fiddly implementation details, especially if you're doing it in your kitchen/garage. A lot of the difficulty comes with the tedium of maintaining sterile conditions and lots and lots of pipetting.
If you're really interested in DIYBIO there are subreddits and many tuts out there, but fair warning: getting started is easy, but the devil is in the details a heck of a lot more than learning to code.
Maybe when we get a clear answer, I'll consider checking my genome. But not before.