Cynics will say that nothing says “trusted neighborhood doctor” quite like a company that is a cross between Big Pharma and Big Tech – but apparently Anne Wojcicki’s 23andMe wants to be perceived as having the characteristics of all three.
The company, best known for harvesting genetic data from millions of Americans via spit tests that produced questionably useful information to the customers, recently went public, and now the serious side of its business is emerging – using all that data to develop new drugs and usher in the era of a new kind of Big Pharma that relies on Big Tech strategies of collecting data and monetizing it.
It hasn’t exactly been a secret that this was the plan all along, as a report in Bloomberg now shows, citing Wojcicki’s early pitch to investors. This is not unlike what Wojcicki’s former husband, Sergey Brin, did with Google: it started out as a search engine, that once it had enough personal data harvested from users, became a massive advertising company.
Hellbound and Down 