Now Everyone Can Know What’s In Their DNA
The Revolutionary Lab Counsyl is Making Genetic Testing Affordable, Fast, and Friendly
The robots handle the saliva with care. They group scores of tiny, rubber-capped test tubes into orderly racks and position them under plunging needles. An articulated arm moves some of them from one automated track to another, and all of them eventually get loaded into a small, box-shaped device whose sole job is to vigorously shake things. This separates patients’ DNA from their spit. Everything that this huddle of roughly 200 robotic components is doing is about extracting valuable genetic signals from raw physiological noise.
The automated employees at this mechanical lab in South San Francisco are the clicking, whirring heart of Counsyl, a startup designed to make lifesaving genetic sequencing as commonplace as cholesterol tests. That means finding more efficient, and more affordable, ways of hunting down the telltale markers in DNA that indicate a patient’s risk of passing along certain diseases to a child, or of developing specific cancers herself. But it also means transforming the impenetrable and customer-averse field of medical diagnostics into something it’s never been—an inviting online experience. Robots are key to Counsyl’s strategy. Just as important, though, and maybe more revolutionary, is its user experience. Innovation, in genetic testing, can be as simple as treating your patients like humans.
If Counsyl’s bright, uncluttered website is your first time visiting a medical-diagnostics lab online, you might be duped into thinking they’re all so friendly. Typically, labs use their web presence as a kind of back-lot freight entrance, where requests, approvals, and other administrative communications are funneled to and from doctors’ offices, hospitals, and insurance providers. Customers simply get in the way. Counsyl, however, looks like an e-commerce site, greeting customers with clear information about the two DNA screenings it currently offers: family prep, which identifies whether you’re a carrier for more than 100 disorders that could be passed along to a child, and inherited cancer, which looks for your own elevated risk of developing breast, ovarian, or prostate cancer. Both tests have to be prescribed by a physician, but the bulk of the interactions, from placing the initial order to receiving a clear explanation of the diagnostic results, are between the patient and Counsyl. Whereas genetic-testing company 23andMe was founded with a mission to inform customers directly that they might have a predisposition for Parkinson’s, say, or Alzheimer’s, Counsyl focuses only on what it calls “clinically actionable data”—information that warrants direct treatment now, which could range from an early mammogram to checking an embryo for specific conditions before in vitro implantation. So far, the company’s fully accredited laboratory has tested roughly 250,000 people. The company currently works with more than 15,000 medical professionals and a network of insurance providers that includes some 150 million subscribers.