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Challenges and recommendations for epigenomics in precision health

Nature Biotechnology volume 35, pages 1128–1132 (2017)Cite this article

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In March 2017, US life insurance company, GWG Life (Minneapolis) started to require policy owners to submit saliva samples. The company was not interested in the genes that their customers inherited, but in the epigenetic state of genes in the form of DNA methylation, for which it had licensed an epigenomic technology to predict an individual's health and life span1,2. This raises the issue of individual epigenomic profiles being used to charge more or less for insurance coverage—or to deny life insurance altogether. The silver lining is that the epigenetic profile is not fixed in stone; you may improve your epigenome by changes in diet, exercise, or other modifications.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J.A. Stamatoyannopoulos (U. Washington), C.-T. Wu (Harvard Medical School) and J. Schloss (NHGRI) for input. We thank the National Human Genome Research Institute for support.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Personal Dynamic Regulomes, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Ava C Carter, Howard Y Chang, William J Greenleaf, Michael P Snyder, Alexander Urban & Wing Wong

  2. Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    George Church

  3. Wyss Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    George Church

  4. BEFORE Brands, Menlo Park, California, USA

    Ashley Dombkowski

  5. The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, USA

    Joseph R Ecker

  6. Howard Hughes Medical Institute,

    Joseph R Ecker

  7. Color Genomics, Burlingame, California, USA

    Elad Gil

  8. Epinomics, Menlo Park, California, USA

    Paul G Giresi

  9. Center for Law and the Biosciences, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Henry Greely

  10. Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    William J Greenleaf & Michael P Snyder

  11. Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Nir Hacohen

  12. University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

    Chuan He

  13. Howard Hughes Medical Institute,

    Chuan He

  14. Center for Cancer Systems Biology, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    David Hill & Marc Vidal

  15. Department of Dermatology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Justin Ko

  16. Department of Medical Informatics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Isaac Kohane

  17. Departments of Genetics and Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Anshul Kundaje

  18. Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Megan Palmer

  19. 23andMe, Mountain View, California, USA

    Joyce Tung

  20. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Alexander Urban

  21. Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Wing Wong

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  1. Ava C Carter
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Howard Y Chang.

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Competing interests

H.Y.C. is a co-founder and serves on the SAB of Accent Therapeutics and Epinomics; G.C. has the following financial interests (arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/tech.html); A.D. is CEO of Before Brands; J.R.E. is a member of the scientific advisory board of Epinomics and Pathway Genomics; E.G. is the co-founder and chairman of Color Genomics and an investor in WholeBiome, Karius, Epinomics, and Encoded Genomics; P.G.G. is a co-founder of Epinomics; W.J.G. is a co-founder of Epinomics; C.H. is a scientific founder of Accent Therapeutics; M.P.S. is a founder and member of the science advisory board of Personalis and Qbio, and a science advisory board member of Genapsys and Epinomics; J.T. is an employee of 23andMe; M.V. serves as a member of the SAB of seqWell.

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Carter, A., Chang, H., Church, G. et al. Challenges and recommendations for epigenomics in precision health. Nat Biotechnol 35, 1128–1132 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4030

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