vishakh82

Just to be clear, we are not ourselves working on private home sequencing.

I'm aware of people working on at-home devices but that is not our own approach.

We are just working on a mixing service to anonymize data user identities as their samples and data move through labs, logistics, etc.

Legal protections around genetic data can easily be rolled back in several ways, both incremental and drastic.

While it's true someone's DNA can easily be collected by a sufficiently motivated party, there is still a need at scale for something regular people can use to investigate their ancestry and predispositions without becoming datasets for unheeding organizations.

The 23andMe hacks, for example, should be a sobering realization that personal genomics is a systemic risk for several classes of people.

Thanks! And, yes, exactly..MPC can be a boon for such data sharing.

I think I understand what you’re saying.

We’re focusing on an incremental improvement.

There are people actively working on private home sequencing, at home analysis devices, etc and they’re best placed to do it.

We’re trying to get ahead of a near future where people, implicitly or explicitly, are paid for their genetic data in insecure or exploitative ways.

Let people get their DNA sequenced without giving up anonymity or privacy.

Let people benefit from DNA data analysis without the data leaving their device or sphere of control.

Let people monetize their genetic data without compromising their security.

The idea is to create an incentive or altruistic mechanism for people to contribute their data without losing anonymity and privacy.

Not our lab. We simply aggregate the anonymous samples and then work with third party accredited labs.

We have shown that we can batch user samples and then send them anonymously to the lab. Users can then use an MPC protocol to securely fetch their data without losing anonymity.

We plan to roll out a product called Batcher which does this soon.

You're right, most analyses are done using biobanks, etc right now. The sentence is an oversimplification but people still implicitly contribute their data to insecure and centralized sources.

If we can enable people to get sequenced not just when they are sick but for altruistic or financial reasons without leaking their DNA data, we could unlock much bigger datasets than currently available, especially from populations that are underrepresented or ignored.

Hi, I’m a member of the Monadic DNA team.

This post describes a local-first approach to personal genomics. Large-scale analysis (processing raw genotype data against the GWAS Catalog, >1M traits) runs entirely on the user’s device.

LLMs are used only for exploration and summarization of selected results and they never see raw genetic data. Users can choose different LLM backends depending on their preferences, including a TEE-based option ( nilAI), local models via Ollama, or hosted models via HuggingFace.

Happy to answer technical questions about the pipeline, privacy tradeoffs, or limitations.

A privacy-first genomics tool that lets you explore hundreds of thousands of genetic traits from GWAS Catalog data and analyze your genetic information entirely in your browser, with optional secure LLM analysis.