23andMe is ending its cancer research program and slashing over 200 jobs

Nov 12, 2024 09:20 PM - 1 month ago 39486

The familial testing patient plans to licence aliases waste the therapies it’s developing.

By Emma Roth, a news writer who covers the streaming wars, user tech, crypto, societal media, and overmuch more. Previously, she was a writer and editor astatine MUO.

Nov 12, 2024, 2:20 PM UTC

23andMe is laying disconnected 40 percent of its employees, aliases complete 200 workers, arsenic the institution attempts to retrieve from past year’s monolithic information breach and reverse its plummeting banal price. The familial testing institution besides announced that it will unopen down its therapeutics business.

Though 23andMe says the restructuring scheme will costs it astir $12 million, it expects to prevention much than $35 cardinal arsenic a result, while “substantially” lowering operating expenses. 23andMe’s therapeutics division, which studied imaginable crab treatments utilizing its database of familial material, will extremity each objective trials, arsenic the institution considers licensing agreements aliases plus income to “maximize” the program’s value.

23andMe has had a turbulent past year, pinch the institution confirming a information breach affecting 6.9 cardinal users successful 2023, revealing names, commencement years, and ancestry information. In September, 23andMe agreed to salary $30 million to affected customers pursuing a people action lawsuit. Meanwhile, all of 23andMe’s committee members resigned aft rejecting CEO Anne Wojcicki’s plan to return the institution private.

“We are taking these difficult but basal actions arsenic we restructure 23andMe and attraction connected the semipermanent occurrence of our halfway user business and investigation partnerships,” Wojcicki said successful a statement.