Google will own it all?

In my recent post "Researchers forced to share", I noted that NIH-funded researchers will now be forced to immediately submit their genetic association data to an online database, dbGaP, with other researchers having free access and the right to publish new analyses of the data following a nine-month grace period. In the comments, Steve Murphy pessimistically replies:

Why care? Google will own it all soon enough.

I know Steve has a big axe to grind in this arena (and is happy to grind it out loud), but is there a grain of truth here? Will Google/23andMe manage to capture and control a substantial proportion of the genomic data generated over the next decade or so?

Unless the world of science is miraculously transformed within the next few years, the answer is no.

Don't get me wrong: if 23andMe succeeds in attracting customers (as I suspect it will), then they will quickly set about combining genetic data from customers with self-reported information about diseases and other physical traits - "anything from symptoms of autism to shoe size". This will eventually give 23andMe (and, potentially, Google) access to a moderately to extremely large data-set with which to find new associations between genetic markers and a range of traits.( How large, of course, will depend on exactly how successful 23andMe is at attracting customers.)

But there will be some major caveats with these data. Most importantly:

1. the 23andMe data is likely to consist almost exclusively of upper-middle-class, and probably mainly white, suburbanites (unless they repeat their Davos free-kit splurge in Buffalo County, South Dakota, which seems unlikely!), and
2. as far as I can tell their phenotype data will be entirely self-reported.

Genetic associations vary between human populations - in fact, this is discussed at length in a 23andMe white paper (PDF) - so associations found in wealthy Americans and Europeans can't be easily extrapolated to the rest of the world's population. Self-reported data is generally considered to be a poor substitute for direct measurement, so 23andMe's physical trait values will contain at least some "noise" due to customer wishful thinking or carelessness - which probably won't completely prevent associations from being found, but it will certainly make it harder.

Given these limitations, although I think we will see some novel and interesting associations emerge from 23andMe over the next five years or so, I don't expect to see huge breakthroughs in the genetics of human health. In other words, we might see a new genetic variant associated with left-handedness or a fondness for broccoli - but it's unlikely that 23andMe will be able to find genes linked to type 2 diabetes that haven't already been scooped up by previous genome-wide scans.

Massive surveys like the UK BioBank, on the other hand, have vastly larger sample sizes, cover a much broader range of ethnicities and socioeconomic groups, and have access to direct clinical measurements. The major funding bodies responsible for funding these massive projects, such as the UK's Wellcome Trust or the NIH, are increasingly committing the research groups they fund to policies of free data release. This means that the identity and nature of the genetic risk variants identified in these studies will be freely available to anyone with an internet connection.

At least for the foreseeable future, 23andMe will be relying heavily on the results of these external studies rather than its own in-house data to provide information to its customers. And so long as these research groups make their data freely available, communities like SNPedia will be building databases and free tools into which people can input their own genetic data (generated by private companies or by researchers) in order to learn about their genomes. Google won't "own" this information, and neither will anyone else.