Galatea Bio was co-founded by Carlos Bustamante, Nicholas Katsanis and Alexander Ioannidis because we identified a gap in the way that population studies were being done and the impact that would have both on future discoveries and also the underrepresented communities. The last 20 years have seen an explosion of genetic information and data. New technological advances have made it faster and less expensive to understand the human genomes but most of those resources have gone to further understanding predominantly northern European communities.
The mission of Galatea Bio is to leverage world class ancestry algorithms and direct them to better understand underserved Latin American populations all while maintaining a strong commitment to ethical research. All our collaborators maintain updated HIPAA training, and we also work with WCG-IRB to provide strong and responsible bioethics to our research endeavors. We believe that doing this will help in at least two fundamental ways:
There are tremendous discoveries to be made from looking at large populations. This thesis has been supported by global biobanking efforts but so far these have focused primarily on northern European communities. We believe that expanding the diversity of the dataset can dramatically accelerate the discovery rate in the field of genomics
This pandemic has highlighted that we still have substantial gaps in health outcomes. If we continue along the path of focusing only on small reference populations the drive into personalized medicine can only exacerbate those outcomes. Our goal is to leverage diverse datasets to help narrow the gap in health outcomes for underrepresented minorities.Genetic studies in non-European cohorts could add important pieces in the missing heritability puzzle by uncovering novel genetic associations that occur more or less frequently in ethnic minority groups. Our goal is to learn from the unique genetic make-up of minorities and exploit this knowledge to develop drugs for the whole.
Galatea Bio offers it's solutions under three main organizations
GB Health focuses on building a clinical lab able to deliver actionable results to our partners in the clinic and pharma.
GB Community is our foundational research offering in biobanking with the Biobank of the America as our flagship. This infrastructure can then be expanded to other communities with the focus on diversity as a central tenet.
GB Discovery here we can leverage the work in our Health and Community solutions to deliver the next generation of new algorithms and pharmaceutical targets.
