AncestryDNA's health test is to be discontinued

Bloomberg News reports that Ancestry are discontinuing their health test after just over a year to focus on their core family tree business. This will lead to the loss of 77 jobs. These job losses are on top of the 100 redundancies announced in February 2020 which were attributed to “a slowdown in demand across the entire DNA category” now that “most early adopters have entered the category.”  

There has also been speculation that sales of DNA kits have slowed because of privacy concerns and the use of genetic genealogy databases by law enforcement agencies in the US, though this effect has been difficult to quantify. Ancestry's Guide for Law Enforcement states:

Ancestry does not voluntarily cooperate with law enforcement. To provide our Users with the greatest protection under the law, we require all government agencies seeking access to Ancestry customers’ data to follow valid legal process and do not allow law enforcement to use Ancestry’s services to investigate crimes or to identify human remains.

However, the media reporting often conflates Ancestry with FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch, the two ancestry companies that do permit law enforcement access so there might well have been an indirect effect. 

Ancestry's health product, known as AncestryHealth, was launched to a great fanfare in October 2019, but the test was only ever available to customers in the US.

It was announced in August that Ancestry was to be acquired by the investment company Blackstone, though GIC, a sovereign wealth fund in Singapore, would continue to maintain a minority stake in the company. The $4.7 billion acquisition was duly completed in December 2020. At the same time, we learnt that Margo Georgiadis, Ancestry's President & CEO, was going to leave the company at the end of 2020. A new CEO is expected to be appointed in early 2021 who will "drive the next phase of the company's ongoing growth". Georgiadis was only appointed in 2018. In a blog post announcing her departure Ancestry said that during her tenure:

the company has grown to more than 3.6 million subscribers and built the largest consumer DNA network in the world with nearly 20 million people. Ancestry’s core Family History subscription revenue, which anchors the company, has reached $1 billion. The company has also dramatically strengthened margins and delivered record-setting cash flow.

Clearly sales of AncestryHealth have not met expectations but this may be good news for genealogists and we might well see more investment in the genealogy and genetic genealogy side of the business.

Blackstone's acquisition of Ancestry was apparently done with an eye on expanding Ancestry's appeal in international markets. The AncestryDNA test is currently only available in just over 30 countries, and is not sold in some major European countries such as France, Italy and Spain. The test was at one time sold in Belgium but was withdrawn last year for undisclosed reasons. The market might well have reached saturation point in the US but there is still plenty of scope for expansion in the rest of the world. It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming year.

Update 22nd January 2021

Three further articles provide more information about the discontinuation of AncestryHealth:

• Discontinuation of AncestryHealth - a blog post from Ancestry
• Ancestry to discontinue NGS-based AncestryHealth service - an article from GenomeWeb
• Ancestry shutters health offering, raising questions about future of consumer genomics - a premium article by Justin Petrone of GenomeWeb