Information may “want to be free,” as hackers proclaimed in the 1980s, but for anyone who thinks their genetic information is worth more than $0, there is now a middleman.
Genos, a start-up spun out of Complete Genomics, on Thursday unveiled a crowd-sourcing platform where consumers can have their exome sequenced for $499 — and then connect to researchers who’ll pay them up to a couple hundred dollars to use that genetic data in studies. (The exome contains the DNA that codes for the production of proteins, and although it amounts to just 1 percent of the genome, it harbors more than 85 percent of the known variants linked to diseases.)
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