TIME Health medicine Heres How 23andMe Hopes to Make Drugs From Your Spit Samples The company is making a bold move to enter the drug-making business by using the genetic information donated by its clients On March 12, 23andMe, the genetic testing company best known for analyzing your DNA from a sample of spit, announced the creation of a new therapeutics group. The groups mission: to find and develop drugs from the worlds largest database of human genetic material. Thats a huge shift for the company, which must now build a research and development arm from scratch. Richard Scheller, formerly of the biotechnology corporation Genentech, will lead the group and will also be 23andMes chief science officer. Scheller admits that for now, hes the therapeutics groups only member. But soon after he starts on April 1, he anticipates that things will move quickly, as they do in the genetics world. Thats what attracted him to 23andMe after overseeing early drug development at Genentech for 14 years. Ive seen over the last couple of years how human genetics has impacted the way Genentech does drug discovery, and I thought it might be fun and interesting to work in an unrestricted way … Continue reading →