Anne E. Wojcicki is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief executive officer of the personal genomics company 23andMe, a privately held personal genomics and biotechnology company.
Early life and education
Anne Wojcicki was born on July 28, 1973, in San Mateo County, California. Wojcicki is the youngest of three daughters of parents Stanley Wojcicki, a physics professor emeritus at Stanford University, and Esther Wojcicki, an educator.
Anne Wojcicki grew up on the campus of Stanford. She went to Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, was an editor for their school newspaper, The Oracle, and obtained a scholarship for her sports stories.
Anne Wojcicki earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biology in 1996, from Yale University. Wojcicki did molecular biology research at the National Institutes of Health and the University of California, San Diego.
Early career
After graduated in 1996, Wojcicki worked as a healthcare analyst at Passport Capital, a San Francisco-based investment fund and at Investor AB. For four years, Wojcicki was a health care investment analyst overseeing health care investments, focusing on biotechnology companies. Disillusioned by the culture of Wall Street and its attitude towards health care, she quit in 2000, intending to take the MCAT and enrol in medical school. Instead, she decided to focus on research.
23andMe
On February 27, 2006, Anne Wojcicki, Paul Cusenza, and Linda Avey, founded 23andMe, a privately held biotechnology company and personal genomics, based in Mountain View, California, to produce interpretation and genetic testing to individual consumers. The name 23andMe signifies the 23 pairs of chromosomes of a normal human DNA.
Google invested $3,900,000 in the company in 2007, along with Mohr Davidow Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and Genentech. At the time, Wojcicki was married to Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google. In 2007, 23andMe turned to be the first company to launch offering autosomal DNA testing for ancestry, which all other larger companies now use. In 2007, Cusenza left the company, and in 2008, was designated as CEO of Nodal Exchange. Its direct-to-consumer (DTC) saliva-based genetic testing business was listed Invention of the Year in 2008, by Time magazine. In 2009, Avey left the company, and in 2011, then co-founded Curious, Inc.
In 2015, the company upraised $115 million from investors, led by Fidelity Management & Research, taking its total raised to $241 million. The FDA began to give support to 23andMe’s health-related tests from 2015, including risk from cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, sickle cell anemia, coeliac disease, and certain cancers. 23andMe produced a product marketing advertisement in June 2017, highlighting Gru from the movie Despicable Me. In 2018, 23andMe further marketed its product in advertisements narrated by Warren Buffett.
In September 2017, the company was reported to be producing another $200 million in venture funding with an estimate of $1.5 billion; as of that the time, the company had raised $230 million since it was founded. The company announced that it raised $250 million, afterwards, at an estimation of $1.75 billion. The company stated it is partnering with GlaxoSmithKline on July 25, 2018, and will let the pharmaceutical company use the test results from 5 million customers to produce new drugs. GlaxoSmithKline has also funded $300 million in the company.
Wojcicki is also an Xconomists member, an ad hoc team of editorial advisors for the media company and tech news, Xconomy. In October 2013, Fast Company named Wojcicki as The Most Daring CEO. Wojcicki is a board member and co-founder of the Breakthrough Prize.
23andMe has established one of the largest databases of individual genetic information in the world. Its novel, web-based research approach provides for the fast recruitment of participants to various genome-wide association studies at once, decreasing money and the time required to make brand-new discoveries, and 23andMe has built a standardized resource and proven for attaining new genetic association and validating genetic loci discovered by others. Under Wojcicki’s management, the company has made significant advances in making personalized medicine straight to the public.
Big Data
23andMe has more than 180,000 genotyped customers. Approximately 90% of the company’s customers have opted-in to partake in their research. To date, the company has secured more than 70 million phenotypic data points (individual survey responses). On an average week, the company assembles nearly one million new survey replies from their active online research community. The company currently operates well over 500 people and exports its product to over 50 countries globally.
Personal life
Anne Wojcicki wedded to Sergey Brin, Google co-founder in May 2007. They have a daughter, Chloe Wojin, born in late 2011, and a son, Benji Wojin, born in December 2008. The pair discontinued to live together in 2013, and divorced in 2015.
Franciszek Wójcicki, Wojcicki’s grandfather, was a People’s Party and Polish People’s Party politician who had been elected MP in 1947, during the Polish legislative election. Janina Wójcicka Hoskins, Wojcicki’s grandmother, was a Polish-American librarian at the Library of Congress who was responsible for developing the extensive collection of Polish material in the US.