The Silicon Valley and Wall Street golden kid 23andMe was the DNA testing firm just three years ago.
The company is currently in risk of being delisted from the Nasdaq.
CEO of 23andMe Anne Wojcicki tells CNN that Wall Street shouldn't write her off just yet.
The erstwhile digital unicorn's worth has plummeted by 96% from its top share price of $17.65 in February 2021, despite the company's first surge in popularity.
Currently trading at roughly $0.70 per share, 23andMe was notified in November that it was not complying to Nasdaq regulations, which mandate that a business keep its stock price above $1. In other words, it has roughly three months to raise the price or take a chance.
When 23andMe debuted in 2006, it broke down barriers.
The cost of sequencing a human genome was estimated by experts at the time to be around $14 million.
Her father was a physics professor on the Stanford campus, where she grew up.
When Wojcicki recognised an opportunity to transform the genetics industry, she took it.
Wojcicki and her co-founders bet that they could offer consumers with health and ancestry data for less than $1000 by sequencing only a portion of their DNA. They won their bet.
They went public in 2021 and their market value quickly climbed to $6 billion.
The company recently faced criticism for security breaches impacting 6.9 million users, and it has failed to find a method to keep people engaged with its services after they have used the one-time DNA kit.
Wojcicki says she and 23andMe are now primarily focused on medication research, which is a costly and risky endeavour that may take decades to pay off.
More pressing concerns: the company has yet to produce a profit, and 23andMe may run out of money as early as next year.
According to Wojcicki, the problem stems from a slowdown in the biotech sector rather than internal issues.
Wojcicki is confident that genetic sequencing will alter healthcare and drug discovery, and that 23andMe will be well-positioned to capitalise on this opportunity.
Drug discovery is a lengthy process, with an average time of 10 to 15 years from target identification to FDA approval.
This Cyber News was published on www.cysecurity.news. Publication date: Thu, 15 Feb 2024 16:13:04 +0000