alt Hacker NewsIn genetics the end user is never the consumer. You have to collect blood, prepare it, sequence it. These are all highly specialised steps in which something will and can go wrong, and that’s why typically a hospital carries them out. That’s before even getting the device to do sequencing. The cheapest nanopore comes you at a couple ten thousand euros. Given the premise your work strikes me as oddly theoretical. Who is that mystery home DNA lab that needs decentralised private compute? Also, and funnily enough, for much of the genomic pipelines to run (eg a paternity test or a cancer test), a home computer is sufficient. Again, of course, you would need proper medical training to read, interpret and judge the results, which is why a hospital does it… so what problem exactly are you solving?
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$599 for 30x coverage sequencing of any whole genome: https://www.the-odin.com/whole-genome-sequencing-30x/
Or purchase the equipment you need to DIY.
couldn't this argument could be made against a lot of scientific research? i bet it took a long time for the average consumer to benefit from the discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA.
and the government funds that kind of stuff even. so what's wrong with a private person doing it?
There are many motivations for consumer genomics and they might pick up further.
https://vishakh.blog/2025/07/08/using-mpc-for-anonymous-and-...
If you look at a previous experiment we did, the costs for getting genotyped are pretty moderate (<$80) and going down further. Blended genome-exome (<$150) and full genome sequencing (<$500) are getting cheaper as well.
Through our Explorer product (https://explorer.monadicdna.com/) we let people glean information about their genome using GWAS Catalog data.
This PoC addresses the next step, i.e. how to keep genetic data private at the user level while still allowing aggregate studies to happen, with or without financial incentives.