March 12, 2009
Google Co-Founder Backs Vast Parkinson’s Study
By ANDREW POLLACK
Sergey Brin, the billionaire co-founder of Google, says he plans to contribute money and his DNA to a large study intended to reveal the genetic underpinnings of Parkinson’s disease.

The study, to be announced Thursday, will be conducted by 23andMe, a company co-founded and co-managed by Mr. Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki. The company offers a personal genomics service, in which it scans the DNA submitted by its customers and provides information on their health risks, ancestry and other traits.

Now it hopes to use its service and its growing database of consumer DNA to conduct medical research. The company hopes to recruit 10,000 people with Parkinson’s disease for the study.

Mr. Brin, 35, revealed last September that he had a genetic mutation that sharply raised his risk for developing Parkinson’s. His mother, Eugenia Brin, already has the disease.
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Mr. Brin, who will pay the bulk of the study’s costs, declined to say what that cost would be. The people with Parkinson’s disease who enter the study would receive the same analysis of their DNA as other 23andMe customers, but would pay only $25 instead of the usual $399.

Executives at 23andMe say they hope to do similar studies for other diseases. “There’s a huge opportunity for us if we can make research more efficient,” Ms. Wojcicki said.

Such studies might also become a source of revenue for the company, if, say, drug companies, were to pay for 23andMe to mine its database or to analyze the DNA of patients in clinical trials.

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link
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/bu...1&ref=business