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23andMe is Looking for Individuals Who’ve Recovered From COVID-19 Hospitalizations to Participate in New Study

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NEW YORK (PRWEB)

Scientists around the world are racing to understand COVID-19 and the novel coronavirus that causes the disease. Among the questions they’re asking: why do most people who are infected show mild to moderate symptoms (or possibly no symptoms at all), whereas others develop a severe form of the disease? To help gather more insights, 23andMe has launched a research study to help determine whether genetics may play a role.

Recently, 23andMe scientists, Joyce Tung and Adam Auton, participated in a Satellite Media Tour to discuss initial results from the study and what they hope to find.

A video accompanying this announcement is available at: https://youtu.be/SzcjtHYDaUQ

23andMe’s unique research model, with millions of customers consenting to participate, offers their scientists a powerful tool for potential insight into the role genetics may play in explaining differences in the severity of the novel coronavirus.

Encouraged by the overwhelming interest (with more than 600,000 existing 23andMe customers already enrolled to participate, including more than 8,000 who’ve confirmed they had the virus), 23andMe is opening enrollment to people who have been hospitalized with the disease but are not currently customers. Opening up the research to individuals with more severe symptoms will increase their ability to learn how genes may play a role in the severity of this disease.

For more information, visit 23andMe.com

About Joyce Tung, PhD – Vice President, Research at 23andMe:

Joyce joined 23andMe in 2007 and leads the 23andMe research team, which is responsible for consumer health and ancestry research and development, academic and industry collaborations, computational analyses for therapeutics, and new research methods and tools development. While a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, Joyce studied the genetics of mouse and human pigmentation. She earned her PhD in Genetics from the University of California, San Francisco where she was a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow.

About Adam Auton, DPhil – Principal Scientist, Statistical Genetics at 23andMe:

Adam joined 23andMe in 2015. He manages a group within the Research team with a focus on statistical and population genetics. Before joining 23andMe Adam was an assistant professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he studied genetic variation in global human populations, and held a central role within the 1000 Genomes Project. Adam earned his DPhil in statistics from Oxford University, before completing his post-doctoral training at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford, and Cornell University.

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