The golden age of genomic healthcare, a time when individual genetic profiles are used to target therapy and design preventive recourse, is still in its infancy, but Linda Avey helped push it forward in a major way. She’s a co-founder of 23andMe, a company that provides personal genetic reports online. Simply by providing a saliva sample, you’re able to learn about yourself through the lens of your DNA. 23andMe represents a radical democratization of scientific knowledge and the beginning of a new age of consumer genomics. There are now over 850,000 people enrolled, making it the world’s largest genetic database tied to its participants. And a vast majority of these genetically-armed individuals contribute to the company’s research mission. 23andMe was chosen as Invention of the Year in 2007 by TIME magazine and has been the subject of many in-depth articles and
Linda’s current start-up is We Are Curious, Inc., which she co-founded in 2011. Curious is an online platform where diverse data from sensors, wearables, trackers, apps, social media, biometrics, and other sources of personal data can be gathered and explored to answer life’s questions. The proliferation of these devices and the accumulation of personal data can be overwhelming; Curious provides analytics, a social graph, and an infrastructure for people to get the most out of that data.
Prior to her start-up experience, Linda spent over two decades working in the pharma/biotech and biomedical research field, directly interfacing with scientists who sequenced the human genome to protein biochemists mapping the proteome.