Hospitals

Doctor, here are your genes. An interview with 23andMe

What better way to get doctors to use genetics with their patients than to show them their own genetic code? That's something 23andMe has started to do with the Cleveland Clinic. The company, which offers a personal genome service to reveal trails from ethnic background to cancer probabilities, gave a handful of Clinic physicians the details of their genes.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — What better way to get doctors to use genetics with their patients than to show physicians their own genetic code?

That’s something 23andMe has started to do with the Cleveland Clinic. The California company, which offers a personal genome service to reveal trails from ethnic background to cancer probabilities, gave a handful of Clinic physicians the details of their genes. It’s part of a very early exploratory relationship between the Clinic and 23andMe (Anita Cosgrove, the wife of Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove, is director of strategic alliances at 23andMe).

23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki was part of a panel discussion at the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit on Tuesday discussing the market for consumer genotyping and its application in characterizing cancer-related genes. In a video, Wojcicki discusses how doctors are handling patients who bring the genetic code to the office, and how patients will start to pick and choose treatments based on their genetic makeup.

“I think people are going to say I don’t want to pay my 20 percent co-pay on a $30,000 drug… unless it’s going to work for me,” Wojcicki said.

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