The Social Life of the Microbiome
companies behind
DTC microbiome test kits
Who makes dtc microbiome test kits?
*This is not an exhaustive list*
CEO and Founder, Naveen Jain (entrepreneur)
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Incorporated in 2016
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Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, USA
Viome
CEO and Co-founder, Richard Lin (former software product manager)
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Incorporated in 2016
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Headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA
Ombre
CEO and Co-founder Sergey Musienko (regenerative medicine research, entrepreneur)
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Incorporated in 2016
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Headquartered in London, England, UK
Atlas
how did these companies emerge?
Naveen Jain is also the CEO of BlueDot
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In 2017, they joined with the Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) in a "cooperative research and development agreement” for metatranscriptomic sequencing
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This technology was then exclusively licensed to the BlueDot subsidiary, Viome, which was founded specifically around the commercialization of this technology
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Viome scientists Momo Vuyisich and Andrew Hatch were both previously employed at LANL where they developed “SPIDRWEB” (the exclusively licensed technique) in 2016
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SPIDR-WEB = “Sample Preparation for Infectious Disease Recognition - With EDGE Bioinformatics” is a data analysis platform that identifies and quantifies relative abundance of all microorganisms in a sample and also incorporates filtering out of non-informational RNA
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This project received funding from the Department of Defence Threat Reduction Agency
Selling the microbiome
The commercialization of microbiome sequencing technologies by corporations selling testing kits to consumers can be situated within the economies of venture capital and wellness. Anthropologist and STS scholar Alexandra Widmer (2021) understands this as,
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The DTC test companies’ overall goal of collecting the genomic data of bacteria in
the human gut is not only to sell individual health profiles to consumers, but also
to assemble large sets of data that can be analysed and further monetised...as it is a DTC test rather than a clinical one, this reproductive labour (unpaid work such as meal planning, food shopping, and cooking according to the test results’ recommendations) benefits the companies themselves, as customers’ dietary changes and follow-up tests provide data that is then used to improve products, share prices, and profit margins (7-8).
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With this in mind, the DTC microbiome test kits can be understood as products of the bioeconomy of wellness tests, raising new questions on the meanings and implications of applying science to intersections of human health and profit making (Widmer 2021, 6; 10).
References
Widmer, Alexandra. 2021. "Positioning Human Microbiome DTC Tests: On the search for health, data and alternatives amid the financialisation of life." Medicine Anthropology Theory 8 (2): 1–12.https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.8.2.5127