23andMe Cuts 100 Jobs as Consumer DNA Testing Growth Slows
23andMe Cuts 100 Jobs as Consumer DNA Testing Growth Slows
(Bloomberg) -- 23andMe Inc. is cutting 100 jobs as the once-booming business of consumer genetic testing has slowed.
The job reductions, equivalent to about 14% of the workforce, will primarily effect areas such as clinical trials that aren’t core businesses, the Silicon Valley company said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg. Instead, 23andMe will narrow its focus to divisions such as consumer testing and therapeutics.
News of the job cuts was earlier reported by CNBC.
In November, CEO Anne Wojcicki told Bloomberg that 2020 would be a difficult year for the company, as she expected a slowing of growth due in part to consumer concerns regarding privacy.
“There’s a lot of fears around privacy,” she said at the time. “People are distrustful of tech right now.”
Last year sequencing company Illumina Inc. said in an earnings report that there had been a lull in the direct-to-consumer genetics testing market. Concerns about genetic information potentially winding up in the wrong hands have grabbed headlines ever since investigators used an open-source genealogy website to track down a suspect in the decades-old case of the Golden State Killer in 2018.
More than 10 million customers have taken 23andMe DNA tests, and leveraging that trove of data has become an increasing focus of the business. In 2018, U.K. pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline Plc took a $300 million stake in the company to tap into the data and collaborate on drug development. And this month, 23andMe announced it had licensed an antibody developed in-house to treat inflammatory diseases to Spanish drugmaker Almirall SA.
23andMe, which was founded in 2006, has raised $786 million in venture funding, according to Crunchbase.
--With assistance from Timothy Annett.
To contact the reporter on this story: Kristen V. Brown in San Francisco at kbrown340@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Drew Armstrong at darmstrong17@bloomberg.net, Cécile Daurat, Timothy Annett
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