A Biobank for the Americas and a Genomics Lab Power Precision Health for All

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / March 18, 2024 / Illumina:

At Galatea Bio, Carlos D. Bustamante enriches the diversity of genomic datasets and brings precision medicine to underserved populations

Originally published on Illumina News Center

In the early days of the pandemic, personal and professional aspects of Carlos D. Bustamante's life were converging. His daughter had just fallen ill with a post-infectious condition at a time when he was partnering with a team at Stanford University to study why some children recover better from strep infections than others. So when the coronavirus came on the scene, Bustamante, a population geneticist by training, became curious about what patterns could emerge from individuals who contracted the virus and how they recovered. Very quickly, he asked his Stanford colleagues to keep all the coronavirus swabs they collected at the clinic so that he could study the valuable genetic material they held. "I viewed this COVID epidemic as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to follow people longitudinally," he says. "We could sequence that material and link it to health record data to prospectively follow a person's progress."

When it came to collecting genetic samples, Bustamante prioritized diversity. As a Venezuelan American, he recognized the importance of representing Hispanic Latinos adequately in genetic datasets.

"We've known that we can do genetic mapping in Latin American populations for over 40 years," he says, in a nod to the fact that the gene for Huntington disease was discovered in Venezuela. "I wanted to build that map, both for Latin America and for patients suffering from neuropsychiatric, cardiological, or metabolic conditions."

Later in 2020, Bustamante cofounded Galatea Bio with Nicholas Katsanis and Alexander Ioannidis with the goal of expanding the diversity of genetic datasets beyond European communities to understand health disparities. The Florida-based company partners with organizations across the Americas to access genetic materials from Latin and South American populations to power research. It also offers ancestry-adjusted clinical genetic tests based on proprietary generative AI technology in-licensed from his work as a professor at Stanford and investigator at Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.