Dr. Kari Stefansson CEO deCODE genetics

As the founder and CEO of deCODE, I want to welcome you to our blog, deCODEyou. This is a place where you can learn not just about deCODE’s discoveries and products but what others are saying about our work and about the application of human genetics to healthcare. We also hope that it will become a place where we can hear from you. We are at a fascinating juncture in the application of genetics to the practice of healthcare. When we set out to try to search for the genetic causes of common diseases more than a decade ago, we took the approach that what we were doing was fundamentally a data mining challenge. We were trying to find correlations between two datasets: diseases or other phenotypes on the one hand, and variations in the sequence of the human genome on the other. This was a task for which computers were ideally suited. This fundamental insight has served us well, and as we assembled very large population-based datasets on disease, genotypes, and genealogy, advances in genotyping technology, computing power and our own data mining algorithms have enabled us to discovery major genetic risk factors for dozens of the biggest public health challenges of our time.

The purpose of understanding the genetics of disease was to use that information to create new means of diagnosing, treating and preventing disease. As you know, one of the things we at deCODE are focused on now is turning our discoveries into tests for better assessing individual susceptibility to many common conditions, and, through our pioneering genome analysis service deCODEme™, enabling individuals to put themselves in the context of all that we are learning about human genetics. And once again, the technology is helping us to bring understanding of genetics to people around the world. Unlike a large number of other companies hoping to follow on our heels, deCODEme is not just a website that happens to be about human genetics; it is your portal into the world’s largest and most successful effort to understand the inherited risk of the most common diseases in contemporary society. And the same technology that enables us to give deCODEme subscribers a secure, constantly updated profile of how you fit into what we are learning about the genome, also enables us to launch this blog and to engage you in a conversation about how we should use this information as individuals, healthcare systems and societies, to make our lives healthier and more productive.
As we make discoveries we are, by definition, opening up new possibilities and breaking new ground. We are very excited to be at the forefront of this work and hope that you will join us in this conversation.

Yours truly,

Kari Stefansson