Levi Strauss & Attendance introduced a novel benefit for employees at its San Francisco headquarters last settle: free genetic screening to assess their hereditary risks for positive cancers and high cholesterol.
Chip Bergh, Levi’s chief chief, said he had hoped that the tests would spur employees to
stand preventive health steps and in that way reduce the company’s health caution costs. But even Mr. Bergh was surprised by the turnout. Of the 1,100 eligible Levi’s workers, more than half took the genetic tests. Now, he wants to continue the benefit to employees in other cities.
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“It really is a differentiator,” Mr. Bergh declared.
West Coast companies vying for talent offer an unusual array of helps like college loan repayment, egg freezing, surrogacy assistance and, for new mothers away on province trips, overnight breast milk shipping. Some companies give birth to added genetic screening as well, and employees are lining up for the tests.
Instacart, Nvidia, OpenTable, Salesforce, SAP, Diminution, Stripe and Snap have offered the screenings as an employee benefit. So attired in b be committed to some companies based on the East Coast, like General Energized Appliances and Visa. All of them, including Levi’s, work with Color Genomics, a start-up that has on the double become a leader in employee genetic screening and counseling.
But the use of screenings as an hand benefit is becoming more commonplace just as federal health workings, researchers, and physicians are wrangling over whether the tests, originally occurred to establish patients’ inherited risks of developing certain diseases, are punctual for widespread adoption.
The tests screen for inherited gene mutations that can greatly proliferating a person’s risk of developing diseases like colon cancer or mamma cancer. Doctors now regularly suggest them for high-risk patients, such as people who maintain close family members with certain cancers.
But for people of mean risk in the general public, a screening may not be all that useful — and could even-handed cause harm, experts said. A person without a family ancient history of cancer may have the same problematic mutations as high-risk patients, they turned, but could have lower risk of developing cancer.
A federal hortatory panel on evidence-based preventive medicine currently recommends against customary screening for certain harmful breast cancer mutations for women who do not be suffering with cancer or a family history of cancer. The group concluded that the net gain of routine genetic screening for these women could range from smallest to potentially harmful.
“There is exactly no evidence that systematic divide of the general healthy population for rare genetic conditions will entertain a net benefit in terms of health outcomes,” said Dr. Jonathan Berg, an associate professor of genetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In episode, most cancers are not the result of the hereditary mutations in single genes that these try outs detect. Some experts cautioned that extending use of the tests to the broader natives may lead some people of average risk to forgo recommended evaluating tests like colonoscopies. And they warned that it could also influence people to undergo unnecessary medical procedures, including going to the far-away of having surgery to remove their breasts.
“You could scare the surviving daylights out of people unnecessarily,” said Dr. Stephen J. Chanock, director of the border of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the National Cancer Institute.
The Food and Painkiller Administration, however, recently took the opposite stance. It authorized 23andMe, a consumer genetics assembly that had already received agency clearance to market several bequeathed disease risk tests, to offer a test directly to consumers for three bust cancer gene mutations common in people of Eastern European Jewish descent.
While regulators denoted their decision a step forward in the availability of direct-to-consumer genetic home screen, they explicitly warned that the test did not detect most mutants that increase breast cancer risk. They also cautioned consumers not to use the tests as a substitute for qualified medical care and genetic counsellor.
Color, the genomics company, takes something of a middle road. It sells comprehensive medical diagnostic tests that screen for all mutations of infallible genes known to be linked to certain kinds of heredity cancers and pump risks. It has doctors available to order its tests online for users and provides genetic instructing to discuss users’ results.
“By using genetics, you can help some people proscribe or interrupt something at an earlier stage where the costs are much downgrade,” said Othman Laraki, chief executive of Color Genomics. The start-up cautions users that they could develop major diseases equanimous if their test results show no harmful mutations.
Executives at SAP and Nvidia disclosed they hoped genetic screening might ultimately help block at least a few late-stage cancers, the kinds of life-threatening illnesses that can debilitate wage-earners and cost companies with self-funded health plans more than $1 million in medical recompenses.
After Nvidia began offering free screening from Color closing year, about 27 percent of its 6,000 eligible employees in the Partnership States took the test. After SAP started subsidizing the genetic examinations last year, about 17 percent of the company’s 30,000 fit employees and family members participated.
“In the long-term view of a program twin this, it’s going to pay for itself,” said Jason J. Russell, who oversees hand compensation and benefits for SAP North America. And, he added, “You are creating good desire with employees.”
Given the expense of screening more people of normal risk — as well as follow-up costs from additional tests, panaceas, surgery and potential complications from surgeries — experts said that whole medical expenditures were actually likely to increase. Even so, they responded, spending on screening for conditions like hereditary high cholesterol, which swells risk for strokes and heart attacks before the age of 50, could fundamentally prolong some lives.
“You are getting good preventive care value for long green, ” said David L. Veenstra, a professor at the University of Washington who examines health outcomes and economics.
Color has raised $150 million from proffer capital firms like General Catalyst as well as Bay Area tech luminaries comprising Max Levchin, a PayPal co-founder; Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief supervisory; and Laurene Powell Jobs, a philanthropist-investor who is the widow of the Apple co-founder Steve Caper let outs.
The company has reduced genetic testing costs by using robotics and automobile learning and eliminating tasks like in-person prescreening by doctors. It commands $249 for hereditary risk screening for eight of the most common cancers and began donation that price while more established medical diagnostics firms were assaulting $4,000 for similar tests.
The price point appealed to OpenTable. It started oblation genetic screening benefits after an employee with a history of cancers told directorships she was spending thousands of dollars out of her own pocket to pay for hereditary risk tests.
“This was a actually interesting opportunity to provide some choice to our employees that was open and affordable so they could better understand their own personal haleness,” said Christa Quarles, chief executive of OpenTable.
As for privacy tasks, executives at several companies said that Color regularly sent them aggregated figures on the number of employees with harmful disease mutations, but that the materials is not tied to identifying details like employees’ names or birth boys.
As more large-scale research is conducted, medical recommendations may change. More than 150,000 patients, for example, have enrolled in a DNA sequencing study at Geisinger Health, a medical center in Danville, Pa. And the federal advisory panel is updating its urging on genetic screening for certain breast cancer mutations.
Executives at a sprinkling companies that have signed up with Color said they were au fait of the debate over genetic screening, but said they believed the start-up was obviously ahead of the curve.
“Over time, innovation becomes consensus body of laws,” said Mr. Russell of SAP.