vishakh82

I'm aware of people working on at-home devices but that is not our own approach.

We are just working on a mixing service to anonymize data user identities as their samples and data move through labs, logistics, etc.

Legal protections around genetic data can easily be rolled back in several ways, both incremental and drastic.

While it's true someone's DNA can easily be collected by a sufficiently motivated party, there is still a need at scale for something regular people can use to investigate their ancestry and predispositions without becoming datasets for unheeding organizations.

The 23andMe hacks, for example, should be a sobering realization that personal genomics is a systemic risk for several classes of people.

We’re focusing on an incremental improvement.

There are people actively working on private home sequencing, at home analysis devices, etc and they’re best placed to do it.

We’re trying to get ahead of a near future where people, implicitly or explicitly, are paid for their genetic data in insecure or exploitative ways.

Let people benefit from DNA data analysis without the data leaving their device or sphere of control.

Let people monetize their genetic data without compromising their security.

We plan to roll out a product called Batcher which does this soon.

If we can enable people to get sequenced not just when they are sick but for altruistic or financial reasons without leaking their DNA data, we could unlock much bigger datasets than currently available, especially from populations that are underrepresented or ignored.

https://vishakh.blog/2025/07/08/using-mpc-for-anonymous-and-...

If you look at a previous experiment we did, the costs for getting genotyped are pretty moderate (<$80) and going down further. Blended genome-exome (<$150) and full genome sequencing (<$500) are getting cheaper as well.

Through our Explorer product (https://explorer.monadicdna.com/) we let people glean information about their genome using GWAS Catalog data.

This PoC addresses the next step, i.e. how to keep genetic data private at the user level while still allowing aggregate studies to happen, with or without financial incentives.

This post describes a local-first approach to personal genomics. Large-scale analysis (processing raw genotype data against the GWAS Catalog, >1M traits) runs entirely on the user’s device.

LLMs are used only for exploration and summarization of selected results and they never see raw genetic data. Users can choose different LLM backends depending on their preferences, including a TEE-based option ( nilAI), local models via Ollama, or hosted models via HuggingFace.

Happy to answer technical questions about the pipeline, privacy tradeoffs, or limitations.

https://explorer.monadicdna.com/

I'll be adding more features in the coming days!

I recently posted about our first stab at this at https://vishakh.blog/2025/07/08/using-mpc-for-anonymous-and-....

We'll have a waitlist up pretty soon for people to sign up for a batch of private sequencing.

https://vishakh.blog/2025/08/06/lessons-from-using-fhe-to-bu...

https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/initiatives/newborns

At-home sequencing could be a game changer.

The other reply also mentions molecular cryptography which could provide really strong anonymity and privacy guarantees. We hope to do a PoC accordingly some time in the neat future.

We are building under full encryption.

Our project is bootstrapped so we won't be able to afford a 100k audit for a while.

The whole point of our project is to keep people's data always under encryption so that nobody can sell the data even if they wanted to. Using MPC (and FHE) we ensure that nobody can decrypt your data without your permission.

You can also delete your data any time without needing any third party's permission using the latest versions of the libraries we use.

We are building all this go get away from the closed, exploitative model that 23andMe built. The way we are building our infra, our company could go out of business tomorrow and you'll still be able to use the protocol and have access to your data and insights.

Also, fun fact, genetic data from newborns is retained by the state in many industrialized countries. We need to get that data away from "trust me, bro" infrastructure to securing it using MPC and FHE.

The legalese is for informed consent since biological materials are involved, handling liability and pointing out that the exercise itself was experimental and an early step towards productionzation.

The physical token could be a UX nightmare and it could get expensive at scale. Using a more developed app which accept revocable public keys from the user might be more workable.

Our intention is to let each user be a self-contained, enclosed (through encryption) unit where they get insights tailored to their unique genome. At the same time, we want to aggregate data (securely and with consent) from all users to power medical and research findings.

It sort of also works in the programming monad sense as the data is always enclosed and encrypted and never "directly" operated on.

Open, secure personal genomics using fully homomorphic encryption.

With 23andMe bankrupt, I want to put out somewhere secure people can put their genomic data and receive insights. In a few months, I'll have a protocol in place to open up the data to third party apps (with user consent). The data does not have to be decrypted ever to be operated upon!

https://monadicdna.com/

We use fully homomorphic encryption to ensure only you can see your data and your results.

The app will be live in a few weeks.

If you think things like decentralized finance, storage and identity have the potential to improve our lives and offer some of the only genuine alternatives to an increasingly privacy-hostile status quo, please look into the shambolic legislative process that threatens the entire blockchain industry in the United States. This is the time to act and ensure that cryptocurrency provisions are debated meaningfully in Congress before any relevant legislation is passed. What the Senate is doing right now reeks of both outright incompetence and malice. There are many, many companies and builders active on HN who are about to have their existence challenged.