23andIOU Genetic testing company 23andMe declares bankruptcy Former CEO wants to buy it, but the fate of its customers' genetic data is unclear. John Timmer Mar 24, 2025 10:55 am | 10 Credit: Westend61 Credit: Westend61 Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreOn Sunday, the genetic testing and heritage company 23andMe announced that it had entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was asking a court to arrange its sale. The company has been losing money for years, and a conflict between its board and CEO about future directions led to the entire board resigning back in September. Said CEO, Anne Wojcicki, has now resigned and will be pursuing an attempt to purchase the company and take it private.At stake is the fate of genetic data from the company's 15 million customers. The company has secured enough funding to continue operations while a buyer is found, and even though US law limits how genetic data can be used, the pending sale has raised significant privacy concerns.Risky businessThe company launched around the time that "gene chips" first allowed people to broadly scan the human genome for sites where variations were common. A few of these variants are associated with diseases, and 23andMe received approval to test for a number of these. But its big selling point for many people was the opportunity to explore their heritage. This relied on looking broadly at the patterns of variation and comparing those to the patterns typically found in different geographic regions. It's an imperfect analysis, but it can often provide a decent big-picture resolution of a person's ancestry.23andMe faced a number of challenges, though. For starters, the gene chips quickly became commodities, allowing a large range of competitors to enter the field, some of which had stronger backgrounds in things like linking genealogies to public records. This commodification also meant that many potential 23andMe partners in the pharmaceutical industry, who might be interested in gene/disease linkages, could affordably build their own databases or simply rely on some of the public resources that have since been developed, like the UK's Biobank.For many direct customers, the test was a "one and done" experienceonce they learned their heritage, there wasn't a strong enough draw for them to pay for any of 23andMe's other services. The company has recently focused on trying to get people to develop diet and fitness plans based on their genetic data, but that hasn't been enough to make the company profitable.Where will the data go?Former CEO Wojcicki, one of the company's founders, is convinced there is still a viable business there and has been interested in taking the company private for some time. Its sale may provide her the opportunity to do so, provided she can line up the finances for it.Given the business challenges it's not clear what other buyer might be interested in 23andMe as a company, raising the prospect that Wojcicki will be outbid by someone who is interested in the company's primary asset: the genetic data of 15 million people around the globe. Within the US, the use of this information is limited by the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which prevents its use in health insurance decisions and employment. But plenty of other uses may potentially be legal, and customers from overseas may have far fewer protections.John TimmerSenior Science EditorJohn TimmerSenior Science Editor John is Ars Technica's science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots. 10 Comments