One point that is clear from this table is that our DNA is more valuable when it is attached to our medical record, or some kind of verifiable information about our health. Large databases like 23andMe’s can suffer from mis-information incomplete or self-reported data - for example, an estimated 2/3rd of people with self-reported psoriasis likely did not actually have psoriasis (Tsoi et. al 2017).

Another important factor seems to be the ability to go back to participants to gather more information. The 23andMe/Genentech deal, the largest of the group, involved explicitly recontacting and collecting new information from the participants. All of the national genomics initiatives on the list including the UKBiobank, DECODE, and Genomic Medicine Ireland all have programmes in place to facilitate recontact of participants as well as direct access to medical records.

Finally, if the Genentech deal is representative, then the value per person if far higher when the individual is part of a group with the same condition. Put simply, Genentech would not have paid $60 million for just any group of individuals - the fact that they all had Parkinson’s disease drives the value of the data up significantly. The table above focused on large-scale biobanks, but two other high-profile acquisitions, Foundation Medicine and Flatiron Health, which had amassed huge amounts of data on patients with cancer fall into the same category. Foundation Medicine was acquired for >$3 billion and has a database of >300,000 cancer samples, while Flatiron has a database of Electronic Medical Records from cancer patients and was acquired for $1.9 billion.

Based on these observations, we have a few predictions for the future, with some illustrative examples from the past couple of years: