2023: 23andMe CEO talks growth, drug development, and the future of health care
23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki joins Yahoo Finance Live’s Brian Sozzi from the 26th annual Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, CA, to discuss the next phase of growth for 23andMe, partnering with GSK, drug development, and the outlook for the future of health care.
Video Transcript
[AUDIO LOGO]
- Bank failures aren't the only focus of this year's Milken Conference. Yahoo Finance's executive editor Brian Sozzi is covering all of our bases. And, Sozz, you had a chance to speak with the leader in the health-care space. Who was this leader?
BRIAN SOZZI: Hey, Brad. Good to see you. Yeah, there's a lot going on here at the Milken Conference, 3,500 participants. And even while we continue to see what happens with the JPMorgan and First Republic on a big news mornings in the finance industry, there is another theme here at the 26th Annual Milken Conference. And that is health care. IT underlines a lot of the key panels here.
And to that end, I got the chance to catch up with 23andMe cofounder and CEO Anne Wojcicki to get-- or really who brought us inside her next phase of growth for her company.
ANNE WOJCICKI: We have over 50 programs underway with GSK. We do have one that is in a phase I study that GSK now controls. It was a codeveloped, but they're taking lead now. And there's a huge number of programs behind it.
23andMe also has our own wholly owned program. It's an immunotherapy program. So super excited about it. It is definitely exciting to see that you can go from understanding the genetic variation that makes me so excited to saying, wow, some people are genetically not likely to develop a certain kind of condition. And then can I understand that and turn that actually into a drug to help either treat people who have that condition?
BRIAN SOZZI: Is that the Holy Grail in health care, looking out over the next decade, the ability to match up your genetics with figuring out the cure for cancer or some other disease?
ANNE WOJCICKI: I look at all the explosion of all these new technologies with gene therapy, with CRISPR, with RNA technologies, and understanding the human genome. And I think what 23andMe can really bring to the table here is the understanding of the human genome. So, for instance, one thing that we can do really well is we study healthy people, meaning that you might have a particularly interesting mutation that the scientific world thinks like-- they don't know. Maybe it's potentially disease causing.
But because I can study you and I can say, OK, you have essentially a knockout mutation, you're doing really well, you have no other health issues, we potentially know that that-- changing that or modifying that gene is not going to create any other kinds of issues. So it's a way to help the pharmaceutical industry study, essentially, what's naturally going on in humans. So we find studying huge populations and huge numbers helps us just understand that natural variability in people.