SAN FRANCISCO — Consumer genetics giant 23andMe announced Thursday that it would move deeper into the business of clinical trial recruitment, partnering with a fast-growing startup to help match its customers with nearby study sites based on their diseases, demographics, and DNA.
The Silicon Valley company has for months been quietly making inroads into clinical trial recruitment by emailing customers who’ve opted in with recommendations about studies that might be appropriate for them. It has recruited for studies, both interventional and observational, in disease areas including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, eczema, and liver disease, a spokesperson for the company confirmed.
But the new partnership with TrialSpark, which offers a tech-powered alternative to traditional contract research organizations, may help 23andMe address one of the biggest challenges in clinical trial recruitment: geography. The idea is that patients who want to enroll in a clinical trial centered out of, say, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, won’t have to fly to New York and can instead participate by visiting their local doctor’s office.
The partnership comes as 23andMe moves aggressively into the world of drug development, internally mining its massive database for therapeutic targets and inking research partnerships with drug makers, universities, and nonprofits. The company’s giant trove of genetic data — and email addresses — collected from its millions of customers has the potential to give it a leg up on the contract research organizations that have traditionally helped drug companies find participants for their studies.
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23andMe is tight-lipped about its growing business around clinical trial recruitment. The company declined to answer STAT’s questions about how many of its customers it’s helped enroll into clinical trials, how many studies it’s recruited for, or whether it’s charging study sponsors to do that recruiting for them.
Study recruitment also offers 23andMe a chance to put its own twist on the personalized advertising businesses that have turned big tech companies into some of the world’s most valuable corporations. But whereas companies like Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOGL) charge all sorts of firms for targeted ads based on what you click on online, 23andMe could make serious money charging drug makers to serve up what are essentially personalized ads for medical research.
That could hold significant appeal for some customers. Not only can the company’s spit kits find disease risks lurking in their genes — but they may also be a route to accessing experimental drugs and cutting-edge research that could potentially help them and others with their condition.
23andMe’s vice president of business development, Emily Drabant Conley, said the company has yet to do any advertising or marketing to its customers around its clinical trial recruitment business.
But as researchers struggle to fill their clinical trials using traditional methods, “we feel like we have this new way of doing things where we can help connect people who may be interested to trials that may be a fit,” Drabant Conley told STAT. “We think that we could be meeting a very interesting need. It’s still early, but it’s something that we feel excited about.”
Drabant Conley said 23andMe only started recruiting for clinical trials in the past 18 months or so. In the company’s early days, “frankly, we didn’t really have enough customers for it to make sense, and now we’re at a place where that has changed,” she said.
Of 23andMe’s 10 million customers, it considers about 8 million of them to be engaged research participants, meaning that they’ve opted to participate in research and regularly log into their account. More than 75% of 23andMe’s customers complete at least one of the surveys that the company hosts on its site asking them about any medical conditions they may have, among other things.
Date: September 30, 2019
Source: Stat News