On December 5, the US Securities and Exchange Commission gave the go-ahead for LunaDNA to offer ownership shares to people providing their “personal health information,” including their DNA data.
The SEC thumb’s up may be a first, but it follows in the footsteps of Nebula Genomics, which Harvard’s George Church founded in 2016. The Nebula strategy: “Get sequenced. Discover your DNA and ancestry. Become one of the first to profit from your own genomic data.” (However, the public launch of LunaDNA was in December 2017, but Nebula in February 2018).
Both celestially-named companies connect consumers who have access to their DNA findings to researchers whose projects require a critical mass of data. Everyone wins. And in the process, the economics of human DNA sequencing has completely turned around. DNA data are now information for sale.
Remember the decade when sequencing the first human genome came with a $2.7 billion price tag?
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