this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Regeneron is to pay $256 million in cash to acquire "substantially all" of 23andMe's assets, including its massive biobank of around 15 million customer genetic samples and data.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (5 children)

I honestly don't know what they will do with snp data. These investors and VCs have been running scare peace articles for the last two years to drive the company into bankruptcy so that it could be sold and the data harvested. But I honestly think people are really overestimating the value of a dataset showing how different people are from a standard template. It's good for ancestry and correlations but people forget they didn't fully sequence samples. I fully expect the news cycle to change once they figure this out as they try to get people to resubmit DNA for nextgen sequencing, so they can try to salvage their investment.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

You don’t spend a quarter Bil without knowing what you’re doing. The company is involved in drug discovery.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regeneron_Pharmaceuticals

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You'd be surprised how much money gets wasted of stupid projects and acquisitions in biotech because some suit think they understand science better than their R&D team. For analogy sake think about all the stupid shit Microsoft bought and killed or all the chat apps Google created and killed, this going to be Regeneron's Skype.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

this going to be Regeneron's Skype.

Microsoft didn't kill Skype. Zoom popped up out of nowhere and killed Skype.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

In the before times we used hamachi, but it was hard. Eventually, Skype was born and it was good and easy. It worked like a phone and many StarCraft 2 team games were won. But Skype was corrupted by the many Nigerian princes and hot Ladies who only needed a few dollars to turn your life around. This corruption was then baked so deeply into windows it took registry edits to exorcise it. But all was good was we now had discord which took the ideas of hamachi and Skype and delived a better experience than both.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

The VC and founders should be painlessly deboned.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I think it’s weird you’ve made the assumption these professionals buying this haven’t already considered the things you’ve said… like that’s all looked at during the acquisition process

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

Lol no regulation needed huh

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

AS soon as the data is secured, enprison the buyers

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Ah yes. Literally giving your fucking DNA to some private company just so they can tell you that your great grandfather is from Ireland. Who could've predicted this going wrong.

Fucking white people doing anything to get an identity.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago

The worst part is there is cool, if very boomer dad coded, ancestry research. It however involves reading a lot and lot of bureaucratic documents from hundreds of years ago and attaining quite some fields of knowledge to figure out how names shaped over time, how the bureaucratic institution in $time and $place work and such.

A friend of mine does it and he can trace one root of his family back to the 15th century within like a 30km radius circle. It's really cool to see where, when, and therefore likely why, his family moved about for 500 years to end up where they are now instead of getting "you are probably from europe and 2% neanderthal"

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