An API for Genome Apps
By The Daily Scan,
The Daily Scan
| 09. 20. 2012
23andMe is opening up its application programming interface so that third-party developers can create apps that will piggyback on customers' personal genome data.
The company, which announced the API launch at last week's Quantified Self conference, says that genome apps should be of great interest to "self-tracker” community. Conference attendees "immediately latched onto the potential of the Personal Genome API for the self-tracking movement. Integrating various sets of genetic traits into sleep trackers, for example, was a popular topic."
Mike Polcari, director of engineering at 23andMe, tells Daily Scan sister publication BioInform that the company is taking privacy seriously. Interested developers will have to apply online in order to ensure that they are "real and identifiable "and that they "are being thoughtful about which pieces of the genome they are accessing," Polcari says.
In addition, individual-level data won't be personally identifiable to developers, and 23andMe customers will be able to decide whether they want their data accessible to an app.
Wired UK speculates that there may be a benefit for 23andMe benefactor Google, noting that "with the attitudes toward personal...
Related Articles
By Pam Belluck and Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 11.19.2025
Gene-editing therapies offer great hope for treating rare diseases, but they face big hurdles: the tremendous time and resources involved in devising a treatment that might only apply to a small number of patients.
A study published on Wednesday...
By Emily Glazer, Katherine Long, Amy Dockser Marcus, The Wall Street Journal | 11.08.2025
For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby.
Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called...
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 11.07.2025
This week, we heard that Tom Brady had his dog cloned. The former quarterback revealed that his Junie is actually a clone of Lua, a pit bull mix that died in 2023.
Brady’s announcement follows those of celebrities like Paris...
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 10.30.2025
In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he revealed that he had created the first gene-edited babies. Using Crispr, he tweaked the genes of three human embryos in an attempt to make them immune to HIV and...
