Sorry, the blanket dismissal is not entirely correct.
Companies like 23andme are indeed trying to repurpose their data to efficiently enroll participants in trials, as the parent post suggests. While it's not the focus of the GSK partnership as publicly reported, it is absolutely part of the strategy in this market, and arguably more likely to succeed in the long run.
As far as target discovery: yes, there are examples of success with GWAS data (though probably more with rare variants identified in sequencing), but 23andme phenotypic data is rather craptastic vs traditional studies or biobanks. No doubt they'll find things, but you're overstating the power of their data. Source: work in drug discovery in academia; I've been pitched by companies like this and worked with a few.
Agreed re: target discovery. Most of the 23andMe data is not much better than what is already publicly available to researchers via initiatives like the UK Biobank. 23andMe uses the Illumina Global Screening array which has significantly worse output (in terms of number of SNPs) than the 500k patients genotyped in the UK Biobank. Furthermore these genotyping based assays make it impossible to detect rare variants that have never been seen before and may be protective. The data being generated by Helix is probably much better for target discovery, but still not competitive with private datasets constructed by companies like Regeneron.
