What's To Be Done About 23andMe?
Thinking clearly about the company's ties and potential places for collaboration
Why are Chinese-, Russian- and Israeli- compromised billionaires buying large stakes of 23andMe? And more importantly, why is the U.S. government looking the other way?
Is this the usual silliness from the Biden Administration which talks tough but delivers little by way of foreign-compromise? Or something more interesting going on?
I must confess that I find it baffling.
Let’s review the purchases. Perhaps they can give us some indication.
David Siegel and John Overdeck, Two Sigma Investments (699,669 shares to 871,795)
Jim Simons, Renaissance Technologies (660,900 to 3,478,061)
Ken Griffin, Citadel Advisors (467,246 to 1,717,743)
Jeff Yass, Suesquehanna International (374,705 to 596,862)
What’s going on here?
We know that Simons is a front for the Russo-Jewish world whilst Griffin represents the Chinese and Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, represents the Netanyahu Israelis. These are fascinating goings on.
Add to that this curious detail: Carl Icahn is pulling in his horns and declining to fight Illumina in a second proxy fight.
A way I’ve chosen to see the departure of Icahn from the Illumina board fight is that Chisrael is departing from the genomics fight altogether. Perhaps we’re going direct with the Chinese, as well we should.
Never you mind that the first investors in 23andMe were none other than Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein and that Chinese frontman Roelof Botha remains on the board. Don’t we find it odd that Botha has invested in both Chinese drone company DJI and 23andMe?
You’re also not supposed to ask too many questions about 23andMe’s SPAC sponsor Sir Richard Branson or his ties to the Russians or his alleged drug trafficking past. Oh, you thought all those jaunts down to the Caribbean were about cheaper airfare did you?
Don’t look too closely at the company’s ties to Glaxo Smith Kline and all that drug companies criminal behavior. GSK settled with the U.S. Treasury to the tune of $3B, which was then the largest such settlement.
Now it was never a terribly good bet for 23andMe to promise that it could help find new drugs without doing full genomic sequencing.
The hope remains, however, that something, surely something, can be found in the data.
John Thornhill of the Financial Times lays it out rather clearly:
The challenge for 23andMe is to combine a fast-paced healthcare company mentality with a patient focus on drug discovery, meshing together two radically different business cultures, skill sets, customer demands and timelines. It can take between seven to 10 years after a drug enters clinical trials for it to be approved, assuming it works. Maybe the billionaire investors are right to detect value in 23andMe’s data. But it might take a different corporate structure — or an acquirer — to realise it.
Who will step up and acquire 23andMe? I suspect no one at all, especially now that the Biden Administration has promulgated stringent rules on foreign control of American DNA.
Might I suggest that the U.S. federal government step in and do it?
In my view, the reason 23andMe struggles is because it doesn't do full genomic sequence. The genome-wide associated studies it winds up finding is of limited academic interesting.
Perhaps the smarter play isn’t to sell people but to back the creation of a new national genomics lab. A smarter play still would be to harness that lab and its sequenced results.
The future is a mother using questions about her unborn daughter’s genetics whilst she is still in the womb. The future is the military planner knowing which of his soldiers will be ideal for which circumstances.
I think we ignore the role that other countries are playing with respect to genetics at our peril.
Don’t we think it’s important that Vladimir Putin’s daughter is on the board of the Moscow Society of Medical Genetics?
Maybe Americans can find another place to collaborate with the Russians. That is, if we ease up on the sanctions.