Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing: a Case of Potential Harm

Last November, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a “cease and desist” order to 23andMe, a major purveyor of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing. In its letter to the company—issued after three prior warnings—the FDA reiterated its view that 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service (PGS) constitutes a medical device requiring further premarket evaluation:

FDA is concerned about the public health consequences of inaccurate results from the PGS device…we still do not have any assurance that the firm has analytically or clinically validated the PGS for its intended uses.

The FDA’s order, based on potential rather than actual medical harm, has generated a great deal of controversy. In a recent critique published in Nature, Robert Green, MD, MPH, of the Partners HealthCare Center for Personalized Genetic Medicine, and Nita Farahany, PhD, JD, of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, argued against regulating DTC genomic interpretation services as medical devices:

… doing so could put FDA regulations in greater tension with the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects the rights of individuals to receive information, and of ‘commercial...