What is the overall demand? How many customers would be interested? What specific traits are parents most interested in? Funding is the single biggest obstacle I face, and I will be applying for AstralCodexTen funding.
My best guess is that maybe 500 children worldwide have been born with the benefit of polygenic embryo screening. The market is not particularly large right now, though it's pretty obvious that could change. If you actually look rationally at the cost-benefit analysis of doing polygenic screening it's way better than most medical interventions in terms QALYs/$. And that if you JUST look at disease risk and ignore other traits.
From everything I've read so far, the really enthusiastic early adopters are most interested in intelligence. But there's also a healthy demand from people who have a family history of a particular medical condition and want their children to have a reduced risk.
If enough interest is displayed or if I get charitable funding, my gut feeling is that I can offer analysis for <$100 per genome, maybe even <$10.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but a bunch of us are working on an open-source intelligence predictor. We may actually be able to expand the site to include other traits as well without too much of an effort. But the data mostly comes from European-heavy biobanks. If you could get access to high quality chinese data that would be a huge boon.
Would Westerners accept Chinese IQ/educational attainment metrics? The easiest metric to use would be GaoKao scores, but would that be legible to Westerners?
Many of them would, so long as the predictors actually perform well among those with European ancestry. Also, you could likely combine data from European studies with those from Chinese studies to more precisely pinpoint causal variants. Different genetic ancestry groups tend to have different linkage disequilibrium structures, which is very helpful when you're trying to pin down which SNP in a group is actually CAUSING the observed difference.
Would ratings of attended college be acceptable?
Possibly? I guess I would have to know more about the college acceptance criteria. And if I want to know more, most parents probably will as well.
Publications/computer code. Would I need to publish a paper to be considered legitimate?
Maybe? If you plan to go through IVF clinics (which I can tell you from personal experience is very difficult), having publications about your approach and your technology will definitely help.
I actually think something that would help far more would be creating tools to help parents estimate the benefits of embryo selection. LifeView.com used to have a calculator page which showed the expected disease reductions from selecting a certain number of embryos. They have taken it down for no apparent reason, and now there are no tools on the internet where parents can see the expected benefits of PGT-P.
It's so obvious a tool like that is needed. And many others as well.
Reputational concerns. What Western institutions should I be expected to be blacklisted from because of this?
I'm not sure. Many academics would probably view you as a eugenicist (even though many of them aren't quite sure what they mean when they use that term). You'd probably have some pretty loyal fans too, especially if you made a product that a lot of parents really want to use.
I would really appreciate it if anyone can direct me towards a source of European ancestry genomic data with labeled donor information (education, height, ect).
Would Westerners accept Chinese IQ/educational attainment metrics? The easiest metric to use would be GaoKao scores, but would that be legible to Westerners? Would ratings of attended college be acceptable? What about the applicability of the results across different races?
How much of the variance in IQ do GaoKao scores explain? If it is like 0.9, I struggle to see why the average person who's interested in embryo selection for intelligence would care.
I think this has a wide variety of applications, way beyond embryo selection, and that getting bogged down in embryo selection tech might be something you regret e.g. if in 3 years, demand is very high for your skill set but demand for embryo selection remains low, but you spent 90% of your time doing embryo research and only 10% developing your genetics-related skill set.
I would expect that most of the cases where parents do embryo selection, they put a lot of trust into the clinic that provides the service.
If you make a business out of this I would expect that it wouldn't be direct to consumer but likely providing a service for those companies that currently provide embryo selection services which then can sell the service to their customers.
2. Would Westerners accept Chinese IQ/educational attainment metrics? The easiest metric to use would be GaoKao scores, but would that be legible to Westerners? Would ratings of attended college be acceptable? What about the applicability of the results across different races?
3. Publications/computer code. Would I need to publish a paper to be considered legitimate?
Those are issues about product marketing. People buy a lot of shady products without anyone having produced a paper that looks legitimate. On the other hand, not everyone who tries to sell products finds a way where people buy their products.
I would expect that most of the cases where parents do embryo selection, they put a lot of trust into the clinic that provides the service.
Strictly speaking, you don't have to put a lot of trust into the PGD provider. It's like testing cloned dogs - how do you know Sooam (run by a notorious fraudster) or ViaGen didn't cheat you and provide you a $1k dog which just looks a lot like your old one? Well, you just compare the genome of the new one to the old one - there's no way to fake that without cloning! (You use a consumer dog genetics company like Embark, 23andMe-style, for both; so really quite easy & cheap if you want to check if you were cheated on your $50-100k purchase.) Genetics is a lot like cryptography in that checking is often cheap while faking may require astronomical luck or resources.
If they provide genotyping from the embryos and the parents have even ordinary genotyping like $130 23andMe (on sale), one can confirm that the embryo genotyping is accurate by comparison to the parents. If the PGD provider receives only the finished embryos and not any sperm/egg parental samples, how, even if they were maliciously attempting to fake sequencing to cheat the parents, could they do so? As most clinics do not specialize in this sort of Orchid or GenPred-style service and outsource stuff, this is not even that unusual. Since you can ensure accuracy of sequencing of the embryos collectively, what's left for them to cheat you with? Swapping the labels of the embryos? Yeah I suppose they could, but that doesn't benefit them in any way - and even that can be detected by sequencing the resulting baby.
As far as I understand embryo testing is not just about doing genetic testing. It's also about implanting the chosen embryo in the womb in a way that has few adverse side effects.
It turns out that Chinese 23-and-me-esque gene panel already include intelligence markers! For example, 23mofang uses Interleukin 3 as a proxy for brain volume, citing this paper. It's... only significant in women. Not a good sign. But the cited study notes a Danish gene-correlation study that included brain scans, from which they obtained brain volume. Apparently, the correlation is true across races.
In any case, I've been reaching out to past coworkers, and they agree with my assessment that a polygenic database for the purpose of embryo selection would be easy and mostly cheap to do. Being Chinese, we of course have no issues with including factors like eye color, height, intelligence, ect. However, I have several questions before I proceed further.
I have previously published genome-wide association studies regarding cancer outcomes, so I can actually do the analysis and write-up myself. I just need the raw data, which I should be able to obtain by paying a sequencing company with a gene bank to call back their past clients and ask for GaoKao scores.
I would really appreciate it if anyone can direct me towards a source of European ancestry genomic data with labeled donor information (education, height, ect).
Update: For some reason, I didn't consider using previous research like the n=1.1 million educational attainment study. It seems... I can just do everything by myself? I'll sleep on it, but it is certainly interesting.