vishakh82

Thanks! And, yes, exactly..MPC can be a boon for such data sharing.

I think I understand what you’re saying.

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 get their DNA sequenced without giving up anonymity or privacy.

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.

The idea is to create an incentive or altruistic mechanism for people to contribute their data without losing anonymity and privacy.

Not our lab. We simply aggregate the anonymous samples and then work with third party accredited labs.

We have shown that we can batch user samples and then send them anonymously to the lab. Users can then use an MPC protocol to securely fetch their data without losing anonymity.

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

You're right, most analyses are done using biobanks, etc right now. The sentence is an oversimplification but people still implicitly contribute their data to insecure and centralized sources.

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.

There are many motivations for consumer genomics and they might pick up further.

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.

Hi, I’m a member of the Monadic DNA team.

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.

A privacy-first genomics tool that lets you explore hundreds of thousands of genetic traits from GWAS Catalog data and analyze your genetic information entirely in your browser, with optional secure LLM analysis.

I'm building Monadic DNA explorer, a tool to explore thousands of genetic traits from GWAS Catalog in your browser and plug in your own DNA data from 23andMe, Ancestry, etc. All processing happens locally on your machine and AI insights are run in a private LLM inside a TEE.

https://explorer.monadicdna.com/

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

We're building this at Monadic DNA.

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.

I'm giving you general reasons why this is the case. For our own app, we hope to build a protocol where third parties can operate async on user data (with consent).

You may wish to build a protocol where third parties can asynchronously operate on user data. You may also want to have separation between the end app and the compute layer for legal or practical purposes. Finally, you may not want to store large payloads on client devices.

It's really not that bad. We're close to using FHE in a production consumer app.

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

https://www.cdc.gov/newborn-screening/about/index.html

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

We address this point in the article. On the default path with existing rules and regulations some degree of trust in labs will always be required.

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.

Your links seem to relate to regular plaintext sequencing, storage and analysis.

We are building under full encryption.

Unfortunately, credible external audits are really expensive.

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

Not at all. "S3" is only in the loop because that's what labs generally use. In production, when we have ongoing scale, we will not use S3 or anything like it to transfer data between labs and our infra, even if it means using sneakernet!

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.

You're right about "anonymized" and "anonymous". We do point out avenues to reach anonymity.

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.

Think monad as in philosophy, less monad as in a programming burrito.

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.

https://monadicdna.com

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!

We're launching a fully encrypted option for personal genomics called Monadic DNA.

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.

Fantastic work. A great piece of engineering!

If you think all cryptocurrencies are scams or think blockchains do nothing useful, please skip this comment.

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.

I have a blog post that similarly talks about unintended negative consequences of Humean ideas, through the lens of Judea Pearl's work on causation: https://vishakh.medium.com/empiricism-and-scientific-change-....

Shameless self-plug on how DeFi can be done more robustly using functional programming constructs: https://vishakh.medium.com/bringing-true-composability-and-r....

So many people here are celebrating this order due to its supposed abstract benefits but are somehow unaware of the its cruelty. So many visa holders in this country will be unable to leave and enter the country for the foreseeable future. If they have sick parents abroad they will not be able to visit them or, in the most tragic circumstances, say goodbye in person. It won't matter whether someone is a world-class researcher with extremely niche skills or database administrator using commodity technology. They will live in anxiety, fear and uncertainty. One wonders how many proponents of these measures would be willing to uproot their lives and leave the place they call home at a moment's notice. Life is about get a lot worse for hundreds of thousands of hard-working, highly-educated immigrants and there are comparatively few who will shed a tear for them.

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