On Tuesday, Calico, the medical research company Google incubated in 2013, announced it had cut a deal for access to genetic information from Ancestry, the largest family tree website. It’s among the first public moves from Calico, the secretive division born to extend human life.
With its new DNA data, properly anonymized, Calico will look for genetic patterns in people who have lived exceptionally long lives, then make drugs to help more of us do that. The deal also marks another step in the next chapter of tech’s ambitious experiments with biology: After collating medical data, it’s marching the research to market. In January, 23andMe, the Ancestry.com competitor run by Anne Wojcicki, now ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, inked a similar deal with Genentech to parse the genomes of Parkinson’s disease patients. Genentech is the former company of Arthur Levinson, the CEO of Calico. (It’s a small world.)
These companies are good at grabby headlines, but the commercial model for such ambitious research is unproven, and will likely remain so for several years. Tim Sullivan, Ancestry’s CEO, said his privately held company has fielded requests from multiple medical research firms. It has spent over 20 years amassing its databank. He told Re/code: “We have been looking at, and frankly responding to, inquiries from a number of parties about ways that we can collaborate to take the data that we’ve aggregated historically, and that we’re starting to aggregate now, and get some real scale.”
Sullivan’s company had some scale from the get-go. Its subsidiary that partnered with Calico, AncestryDNA, has genotyped the DNA sequence of over one million customers. Two weeks ago, the company launched AncestryHealth, a portal for its customers to track personal health and wellness, and marry that with their genetic data. But its treasure trove, and what Calico really wants, is the extensive, detailed genealogical data. Ancestry.com claims to have more than two million paying subscribers, who have created some seven million historical family trees. It’s a rich well for tracking longevity trends.