The government has abandoned plans to offer paid-for DNA sequencing to healthy individuals in England, following criticism that it would create an inequitable two-tier health system. The original proposal, announced by Health Secretary Matt Hancock in January, would have allowed healthy volunteers to pay for genome sequencing in exchange for sharing their anonymised data for medical research.
Instead, a new scheme called Accelerating Detection of Disease (ADD) will recruit five million healthy volunteers who will have their DNA sequenced for free. The Department of Health and Social Care confirmed the paid-for option had been dropped, with the focus now on including under-represented groups such as ethnic minorities to better understand diseases including cancer, dementia, heart disease and mental health conditions.
The change was revealed in a government green paper on preventing ill health, quietly released on Monday evening. Hancock had previously argued with Theresa May that the paper should not be published so close to her successor’s appointment, and has faced accusations of burying the document.
Professor Anneke Lucassen, a clinical geneticist at Southampton University, welcomed the decision but raised concerns about interpreting genomes from healthy volunteers. She warned that genetic predictions are often not clear-cut, and cited Hancock's own misinterpretation of his prostate cancer risk as an example of how this can go wrong.
Sarah Norcross, director of the Progress Educational Trust, said she was delighted the government had listened to criticism, but stressed the need for clarity on how genomic data will be obtained and results explained to minimise unnecessary worry.
