Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe at the 2014 BIO International Convention

I'm Mike Huckman at the BioBuzz Center where I am pleased to welcome Ann Wojcicki who's the founder and CEO of the DNA testing company 23andMe which as everybody knows has had a significant setback lately but remains on the path to kind of fulfilling your quest to I guess turn personalized and precision medicine from a dream into reality. So let's start with that first. You recently had news regarding establishing the beginning of a path forward with the FDA for approval of your test for specific types of results. Tell us where things stand. Sure so November 22nd we got a letter from the FDA asking us to stop returning health results and so after about seven months we hired significantly. We hired some key leadership and we really started working on what is that key path forward. How are we going to enable customers to get health results back. So we announced on Friday that we have submitted to the FDA our first snip test on blooms. That's a rare disease or condition. It's a rare condition that you can be a carrier for and if both parents are carriers for and they have a child then their child would have a risk for having it. Mostly Ashkenazi Jews. Exactly mostly Ashkenazi Jews. So we submitted on that and really just to get you know work with the FDA to get the platform approved. So how is it that we can actually just set up a pathway so that in the future when we have the say even whole genome sequencing that there's a whole a scalable pathway where we'll be able to actually return lots of health results. So Ms. Wojcicki what are the next steps with the FDA? What do you anticipate the timeline will be and how confident are you that it'll get you to where you need and want to go? I mean these are all great questions. I'm one of those people who's eternally optimistic so I really believe that we've had a great working relationship with the FDA. They have actually been incredibly responsive with us and and it's clear that they are looking for a path to make direct-to-consumer genetic testing something that could that can materialize. So based on you know all the various 510k laws there's 90 days for them to respond and we are looking forward to getting that response and that and and seeing what can what can happen. As a former media guy turned communicator now I thought it was rather noteworthy that you decided to break this news as it were on your own corporate blog as opposed to doing the stereotypical traditional thing which would be to blast out a press release to everybody and their sister. What was the strategy behind that? Yeah so a little bit of history of the company you know we're a startup and so we've always been under a budget and we've been cheap and so part of part of the benefit I think of being a startup and not having being cash constrained is that you have to be innovative and you know so putting out a press release potentially costs money and and it's potentially sort of more of the old school and part of a lot of our customers are online and so it's an effective way for us to actually communicate with our customers and and with the broad media by just putting out information on our sites and then it also drives people to us so so you know I think the origins of it probably in the early days were sort of my budgetary constraints right I just tended to be cheap and and I think in in now when we make a decision we decide we make an actual conscious decision about what information actually needs to go through the whole route and what information actually is is do we just put on our blog? Very smart I think there's a lot of talk here at bio this year about increasing the efficiency expediting clinical trials and research development in this industry what role if you're successful could 23andMe and companies like yours other diagnostic and testing companies play in helping that along? Yeah so luckily I was just I was at a in DC yesterday and I was at chairman Upton who oversees the the energy and commerce committee he actually had a really phenomenal roundtable on focus on 21st century cures. He has a bill I think Upton and to get due to to foster that. Right so so Upton and to get actually fostered this roundtable discussion and I would actually say it's all about how are we going to innovate and how are we going to bring technology together with health care to actually really dramatically innovate and make cures come faster and and one of the things to me that was so central in the theme that that came up yesterday was that the consumer needs to be part of it and that in part by just having researchers and then having sort of institutions and not really engaging you we're missing out on a critical part and one of the things I think that's core that 23andMe is that we want to transform you from a human subject into someone who's actively participating in research where I communicate back with you what the results are I ask you ongoing questions I'm constantly engaged with you because if you have a certain condition you want to know the results and you probably want not just me looking at it but you want all the researchers in the world looking at it and you want to hear if they have more questions for you you'd probably be interested in in answering those questions so how can we actually engage you really with the entire research world and I think that is going to dramatically accelerate the pace of discovery because such a significant part of research today is just on finding the individuals to enroll in the study. And finally there's a lot of debate and discussion here about the capital markets. Is the IPO window still open? Is it reopening? Is it closing? Is it closed? Because of your pedigree you were a biotechnology investor on Wall Street before you started 23andMe what's your assessment right now of the market? Yeah I have I have the luxury of being a little bit more out of it so I wouldn't say that I I know too well but just based on the the information that I get and sort of the interest that I get from VCs and the interest that I get and even you know on people wanting to buy stock and in the secondary markets and such is that there's definitely the biotech market is hot and I do think that there's also been a number of really promising successes that have shown that there are going to be novel ways of looking and it reminds me a little bit when I was investing in the late 90s and it was right around the time that the whole genome was getting going and there was this palpable sense of enthusiasm and I see that with now like there is you know there's these long cycles where it takes a while for a technology to really become into fruition and I think genetics really has that potential of transforming the drug discovery process so I'm I feel a sense of enthusiasm and I get the sense from my biotech peers that there's real enthusiasm. With the caveat that as you said before you're an eternal optimist as well. I am an eternal optimist I wouldn't be in this industry I'd be doing other things if I wasn't so optimistic but I really believe that at some point in our life we're going to see tremendous progress in health care and I think we'll look back and say wow we really did things in a strange way before. Don't we all hope so. Anne Wojcicki the CEO and founder of 23andMe thanks again for joining us here at the BioBuzz Center.