LunaDNA, once heralded as “the world’s first member-owned data-sharing platform for health research,” is to close on January 31, 2024.
The San Diego company made the news official with a statement on its website. Earlier this month, the company had sent an email to customers with the headline “Luna is Closing” explaining that “despite best efforts, [the company] hit a critical shortage of funds in an unrelenting economic market where capital is very difficult to access.” It has deleted its X (formerly Twitter) page.
There have been signs that the company was struggling over the past 18 months, notably in a September 29, 2022, semiannual report to the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC).
In the financial statements, LunaDNA declared that “expenses have exceeded revenues and [LunaDNA] has no cash or liquid assets at June 30, 2022” and that the company had “no plans to raise capital to fund its operations.” Together, these issues led LunaDNA to have “substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern,” it wrote in September 2022. In corporate governance lingo, “going concern” means it does not appear that the company is at risk of closing due to insolvency but instead is expected to survive and thrive. In essence, LunaDNA was signaling that it had gone as far as it could go and likely not much farther.
Who was LunaDNA?
Biotech veteran Bob Kain served as Illumina’s chief engineering officer for 15 years (1999–2014) and saw the company grow from 30 employees into a publicly traded company. He was the inventor of the HiSeq instrument, which was the first instrument to break the $1,000 genome barrier. He was also the executive manager in charge of the development of all instruments and many consumables, including the Beadchip.
LunaDNA’s business plan touted the first and only genomic and medical research knowledge base powered by blockchain and owned by its community, Kain, and three other co-founders—David Lewis, Dan Lin, and Michael Witzraise—raised $2 million from individual investors and former executives at Illumina to launch LunaDNA on December 18, 2017. Lewis was the former director at CitiGroup, and Lin and Witz are both Y Combinator alumni and came from the gaming world, taking top spots at the Redemption Games. Another Illumina alum, Scott Kahn, formerly chief information officer, joined as CIO of LunaDNA
A few weeks later, LunaDNA announced Dawn Barry, another Illumina veteran, as president, co-founder, and essentially the face of the company. Previously, Barry, who joined Illumina in 2005, served as the vice president of Applied Genomics at Illumina, where she integrated market development strategies with product and business model innovation to accelerate the application of genomics in medicine and personal healthcare. In 2012, she helped launch Illumina’s popular “Understand Your Genome” conference series.
Promise the moon
LunaDNA’s community-owned database was designed to be driven by individual customers. In a February 2020 interview with Clinical OMICs (now Inside Precision Medicine), Barry said, “I’ll use the next decade to champion raising the standing of people from subjects of research to partners in discovery.”
The incentive for LunaDNA customers were Luna Coins for contributing platform-agnostic medical information. The Luna Coins would power a blockchain, contain real monetary value, preserve customer privacy, enable massive reach at a low cost, and be decentralized and immutable. By offering compensation, LunaDNA hoped it could drive individuals to share personal data they already own.
Early on, this intriguing approach landed them as the subject of a CNBC article with the mega clickbait headline, “You will soon be able to sell your genetic information for a new cryptocurrency called Luna Coin,” which described how LunaDNA planned to raise funds in the first quarter of 2018. In May 2018, an article reported that LunaDNA had raised $4 million from investors, including Illumina Ventures and Arch Venture Partners. Their last press release came out in November 2022.
But LunaDNA was not the only company exploring the use of blockchain to create a marketplace for genomic data.
Around the same time, George Church co-founded Nebula Genomics, which touted a gamification strategy to provide users with personalized genomics that can help them decode their genes and potentially use their genetic data to extend their lives. ProPhase Labs acquired Nebula in August 2021 with the intention of integrating the Church spin-out’s whole genome sequencing services with the robust clinical diagnostic testing services already offered at ProPhase’s CLIA-certified molecular testing laboratories.
Two additional companies, EncrypGen and Zenome, have also been part of the race to take advantage of the advertised hack-proof nature of blockchain-based software to ensure privacy and security of their genomic databases.
Blockchain genomics aside, LunaDNA failed to take even a small piece of the patient-centric healthcare technology industry pie that businesses like Verily, Flatiron Health, and San Diego-based SEQSTER are slicing up for healthy servings. According to Grandview Research, the projected market size for data integration and analytics is $296.7 billion for 2024.
LunaDNA could not be reached for comment.
