Last year I decided that 2009 was going to be the year I had my SNPs uncovered.

There are a handful of  start-ups that offer services around genome sequencing. A few of the more popular companies are 23andMe, deCODE, and Navigenics.

What are SNPs?

SNPs are Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms. They are an area of your genome that today’s Scientist have made the most progress in understanding. Right now it is a lot less expensive to get your SNPs sequenced rather than geting the whole genome done.

Personalized Medicine

Your family physician practices “Medical Arts”.  It’s called an art because there is a lot of creativity that comes into play while deciding the best medicine for a particular patient.  They take into account your ethnicity, family history, the health trends the local community, and a whole bunch of other factors.  In the next 5-6 years physicians will start using the data from your genome as a tool for that decision making process.

Clinical trials for new drugs need to have a very large panel to test on because while a drug may be have the intended benefits on some groups of people, it may be fatal or have no effect on other groups of people. This opens up a much more precise method of defining groups of people based on their genome. Drugs that would normally be turned down after regular Clinical trials may prove useful to niche groups of people.

Has your doctor ever switched your medication because it didn’t do anything for you?
Codine doesn’t work well in  “approximately 6–10% of the Caucasian population, 2% of Asians, and 1% of Arabs…” – wikipedia

Why do it now?

I’m a science enthusiast and beta geek. I want to contribute to the pool of genotype and phenotype data. Although this may seem like mostly a Health and Science related topic, it has internet community and web geek overtones to it. I’m interested in the discovery and sharing of all the community data that comes with people discussing health issues, hacks, and work-arounds. I want to participate.

I want to understand the code that I am made of.

Full genome sequencing is already available at a price of $5000 USD via Complete Genomics in Mountain View California. They went on record to predict a full genome sequencing at a price of $1000 near spring 2009.  But with Genome Anaylsis a large pool of data from different people is required to start making meaningful correlations. I am betting that 23andme, coming from a internet centric position, will be able to gather the data of genotypes and phenotypes, and make sense of it all, by building a community of active customers and experts.

I want to be a part of that experience and add to the community pools of data.

Eventually I will hack into and improve my genome.
The ability to do this will happen within my lifetime.

Either way, I won’t be human forever.