Bay Area startup will help decode genomes of 1 million Americans
Firm will help decode genomes of 1 million Americans as part of the National Institutes of Health’s ambitious 5-year research effort
Color one Bay Area startup happy: It was the only company chosen to take part in an ambitious new project by the National Institutes of Health to decode the genomes of 1 million Americans. Color Genomics will be working with the prestigious Broad Institute in Massachusetts to help in the five-year effort, which the NIH calls “one of the country’s most ambitious biomedical research efforts ever undertaken.” The NIH announced in late September that it had awarded $28.6 million to establish three genome centers around the nation, including the Broad-Color team, as part of its All of Us program.
For the program, Color will analyze and report data for dozens of genes that can cause serious conditions, such as cancers and syndromes, plus provide pharmacogenomic results that show how genes affect people’s response to medication. The NIH hopes All of Us, for which it has already lined up more than 100,000 participants, will lead to an overall better understanding of people’s health, and even medical breakthroughs.
Burlingame-based Color has been providing gene-testing services since it was founded five years ago. It goes beyond letting customers know whether they have certain disease-carrying genes. It offers the whole package: gene testing and counseling, then taking the information and using it to make health care decisions. Some corporations, including Levi’s, Salesforce and Visa, offer Color’s services to their employees.
We spoke with Color CEO Othman Laraki at the company’s headquarters recently. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q How important is the All of Us Program, and why were you chosen?
A It’s one of the key projects happening around the world — one of the first times that a massive population can have access to genetic information. It’s taking our standard of care from being one that incorporates a small amount of standardized data about each person to one that’s dynamic based on information about you, your body, your family. It’s not just about genetic info, but having the whole picture: personal history, lifestyle, genetics, and a delivery model for that info to be incorporated into your health care.
All of Us is in the same scope and scale as the Human Genome Project. It’s like a moon-landing-scale endeavor, but around getting over this threshold for the health system to incorporate genetic data for large populations.
We have had deep collaborations with scientists, including Dr. Mary Clark King, who discovered the BCRA1 gene. (It’s commonly known as the breast cancer gene.) When we saw the request for proposals from the NIH, we thought, “This is what we do.” Our relationship with Broad was very natural since we had a fair amount of interactions with them already. We contacted each other at the same time, and we put in a joint application.
Q
Tell me about your company’s founding. What is its personal meaning to you?
A
My grandmother passed away from breast cancer. My mom has had it twice. She got tested for BCRA and BCRA2 mutation, and I have it as well. I was quite curious and interested in the link between genetics and disease.
My co-founder (Elad Gil, formerly of Twitter and Google, who holds a Ph.D. in biology) and I started looking at it. A bunch of assumptions are built in when something is expensive. When we were thinking about the company, we asked ourselves was there a way to collapse the cost by 10 times. It cost $4,000 when I got tested in 2007. It involved seeing a doctor and a genetic counselor, dealing with insurance, going to a blood draw. We thought genomics plus software could help take these things from inaccessible to being ubiquitous.
Q
How can companies like Color get past people’s privacy concerns? How do customers know sharing their data won’t end up hurting them somehow?
A
We have two principles that pretty much everything else is built upon: your data, your genome. All of our attitudes and policies stem from that. It’s your data, you tell us how you want it to be used, we give you controls to enable you to exercise choice. You’re not a product that we want to resell.
The second part of that, though, is within the bounds of privacy, there’s a moral imperative to contribute to research and science. Especially in health care, privacy is used as an excuse to hold data hostage. There’s a higher cost to data not being available to the right people at the right time. If a doctor has to treat me, they should know I carry the BCRA2 gene.
There are ways to create data sets without compromising privacy. When people use Color, we ask them if they’re interested in contributing anonymously to research, and about 70 percent opt in.
Q
The All of Us program wants to collect information from all kinds of people, including “groups that have been historically underrepresented in research,” it said. Why is this part important, and how does it fit into Color’s overall mission?
A
While our understanding of cancer genetics has advanced since the discovery of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes in the mid-1990s, the majority of genetics data has been collected from individuals in the Caucasian and European populations. A core part of Color’s efforts to increase access to this potentially lifesaving information is aimed at filling this diversity gap by reducing traditional barriers, lowering costs and making testing easier than ever. More than 40 percent of our clients are from non-Caucasian and European populations. We’ve also partnered with leading research teams and clinics, including on UCSF’s Population Health and Cancer Testing (PHACT) study to recruit participants from understudied populations.
Q
How important is it that companies provide Color testing to their employees?
A
Employers have two bottom lines. They have an economic interest in managing cost of care. For things such as cancer and heart disease, early intervention can have dramatic outcomes and make a difference in cost, in medication management.
The other side that counts more than financial side is the impact on their employees, on having invested in their well-being. An employer can literally help save a person’s life, or their mother’s life, because of the testing. We have helped one of our investors’ mothers, who had early stage ovarian cancer that never would have been discovered.
When those types of stories happen, they have more value than cost savings.