23andMe asks hospitals to recruit the sickest coronavirus patients for DNA research

The home genetic test giant 23andMe has launched a DNA test hoping to discover why the coronavirus makes some people so much sicker than others.

And to do this, it asks hospitals to help register the sickest coronavirus patients because, in order to find the genes that some people are at risk of getting sicker, they need those people’s genes.

Launched on April 6, over 500,000 people around the world who were already 23andMe users enrolled, including 7,000 who tested positive for coronavirus.

But the central goal of the study is to identify not only who gets coronavirus, but who gets the sickest, and there simply wasn’t enough data about this group among 23andMe customers.

Therefore, the company now offers to send free test kits to people hospitalized with ‘severe’ COVID-19. But many of these patients need oxygen support, including getting a ventilator, which makes them unconscious and unable to speak for themselves.

The company is contacting hospitals to help them recruit up to 10,000 additional participants, a senior scientist said Stat news.

Hundreds of new patients are admitted to coronavirus every day in New York alone.

While hospital admissions and death rates are much higher in older patients or those with underlying health problems, 26.1 out of 100,000 people hospitalized for coronavirus are in their thirties, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Forty-five out of 100,000 are in their forties.

Still, most younger people develop only mild to moderate disease after infection.

There is little left to explain why some of these young, otherwise healthy, young people get so sick.

Some scientists, including those working at 23andMe, are looking for genetics for an explanation.

To determine which gene variants or collection thereof might put some people at greater risk of disease than others, it is necessary to collect and sequence the complete set of DNA from a large proportion of the population – often hundreds of thousands of people – across a genome-wide association research (GWA).

23andMe is just one of many groups investigating the role of genetics in coronavirus severity.

Its competitor Ancestry.com is also conducting a similar study, but most of this research is done by universities, not private companies. Many of these institutions collaborate through the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative (COVID-19 hg).

Dr. Jean-Laurent Casanova of Rockefeller University is one of the scientists involved in COVID-19 hg (not in 23andMe study), and he thinks these rare, young patients who are so desperate, seemingly random, fall invisible risk factors called “congenital immunity errors,” he told DailyMail.com in a recent interview.

He and his international team of employees are recruiting coronavirus patients in their 30s, 40s and 50s whose diseases are life threatening and plan to sequence and test their genetics in search of a piece of code that makes them more vulnerable.

In addition to obvious properties such as our hair and eye color, our DNA also contains instructions for our body to build everything from brain cells and bones to the core of our immune system.

Chronic health problems such as heart and lung disease and diabetes also affect the immune system, reducing our natural ability to fight infection.

Some people are born immunodeficient due to genetic conditions or variations.

But Dr. Casanova is one of the scientists at the forefront of the discovery that genetics may also predispose some people to cancer specific infections, not in contrast to the effects of the BRCA genes on the risks of certain malignancies, especially breast cancer.

“Some people have genetic variations that make them selectively vulnerable to that particular virus that remains silent until the patient is affected by this particular virus,” Dr. Casanova in a Skype interview with DailyMail.com.

But they have already started gathering patients from all over the world – most of them in the US and France – to study.

“We are recruiting patients, the relatively rare patients with an unexplained, serious illness,” said Dr. Casanova.

But that’s difficult in the case of coronavirus, a disease so new that only 4.3 million people around the world are aware of the diagnosis, and much more goes undiagnosed.

Although 23andMe has about 10 million customers who have used its service. But people must give permission to be involved in a study with their health data.

Universities and their partner hospitals already have patient data and protections to protect it.

A private company like 23andMe faces a greater challenge in data collection because they have to find these patients through targeted ads or going through hospitals, as they are trying now.

“Opening up the study to individuals with more severe symptoms will help us learn more about how genes play a role in the severity of this disease,” said Dr. Joyce Tung, 23 and Mees Vice President of Research, in the blog post. company about the project.

As with most of its projects, 23andMe promises to protect patients’ privacy by de-identifying their genomic data, removing all links to their names and registrations.

“If you consent to participate in this study, 23andMe should only share your anonymized genetic and survey data at an individual level with qualified research collaborators for COVID-19 and related research,” says the COVID-19 project website.

Data at the individual level means related to one person. “Unidentified” means that the individual-level data we share about you with researchers is stripped of components that could directly identify you (such as name, date of birth and address). ‘

But the company’s website admits that while it is required by law to protect customer data, it may also be required by law to transfer it.