Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, a biotech firm that promises to give customers access to their individual genome, dreams of a different kind of health care system.
Until last year, the firm was also able to give medical and health-related reports based on their findings, but the Food and Drug Administration ended that practice in November, when the administration asked Wojcicki and 23andMe to stop marketing its $99 DNA tests. For now, the company is able to provide ancestry reports and raw genetic data to users.
Customers sign up for the service and receive a test tube in the mail. Customers spit in the tube, return it to the company and two to eight weeks later, they receive a report about their genes.
Wojcicki, who is married to Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, which is also a major investor in 23andMe, spent the early years of her professional career on Wall Street. She said she saw first-hand the way health care economics work.
As an example, she provided a statistic that estimated about 10 percent of the world's adult population would be obese in the future.
"If I'm thinking of that from an investment perspective, this is awesome," Wojcicki said.
The goal for her company is to change the way doctors and hospitals deal with health care in the United States. Wojcicki said she hopes to encourage preventive care through her company's services.
"23andMe intentionally set out to change health care," Wojcicki said. "If I really wanted to make money or have an easy business, I would have opened a coffee shop."
Kara Swisher, a technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, interviewed Wojcicki after the keynote and raised the question of where privacy fits into a service that is dealing with people's genetic material.
"I don't like Google having all this information about my gut bacteria because they'll monetize it," Swisher said. "They'll find a way."
Wojcicki said transparency about ownership of the genetic data—which is held by whoever pays for the test—and exactly what the data is being used for is the key to her company. She admitted the FDA decision in November slowed down the number of people who were signing up for 23andMe's services, but she believes people have a broad enough interest in their own genomes that in 10 years her company will be leading the charge in proactive health care.
"We are providing a service for individuals to really learn about themselves," Wojcicki said. "I think there is a huge benefit to the aggregate data. The individual genome is really valuable for you, but I can't go and monetize an individual genome."