23 And Me And the FDA

As everyone will have heard the personal-genomics company 23 and Me was told by the FDA to immediately stop selling their product, a direct-to-consumer DNA sequence readout. Reaction to this has been all over the map. I'll pick a couple of the viewpoints to give you the idea. From one direction, here's Matthew Herper's article, with the excellent title "23 And Stupid". Here's his intro, which makes his case well: I’d like to be able to start here by railing against our medical system, which prevents patients from getting data about our own bodies because of a paternalistic idea that people can’t look at blood test results, no less genetic information, without a doctor being involved or the government approving the exact language of the test. I’d like to be able to argue that the Food and Drug Administration is wantonly standing in the way of entrepreneurism and innovation by cracking down on 23andMe, a company that is just trying to give patients the ability to know about their own DNA, to understand their own health risks, and to participate in science. I wish that was the story I’m about to write, but it’s not, and it all really comes down to one fact in the FDA’s brutally scathing warning letter to 23andMe, the Google-backed personal genetics startup. It’s this quote from the letter by Ileana Elder, in the agency’s diagnostics division: “ FDA has not received any communication from 23andMe since May.” So we can call that one the practical view: "It ...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Regulatory Affairs Source Type: blogs