A Miami startup looking to sequence the genetic diversity of 10 million people this decade has pulled in $25 million in total funding.
Galatea Bio wants to create a global biobank that can be used to derive insight into drivers of various diseases, help biopharmas uncover new targets for medicines and find new biomarkers. It’s also running a genetic testing business to help inform people of their risk for certain diseases.
The Human Genome Project and corporate programs like Amgen’s deCODE Genetics have helped spur a revolution in the understanding of various diseases and foster biomedical innovation. But many of the genetic insights that researchers have today come from people of European descent.
Galatea wants to include more people from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia in those efforts.
“We got very interested in: How would you be able to do that in other parts of the world at scale?” Galatea CEO Carlos Bustamante told
Endpoints News
. “Fast forward to 2019, I was a venture partner at F-Prime Capital, having started the Department of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford, and my remit as a venture partner was how would we build a new geno-pheno company à la deCODE but more broadly representative of global human genetic diversity.”
The Series A extension, which was disclosed Thursday morning, came from F-Prime Capital, Helios Digital Ventures, Alexandria Ventures, Founder Collective and others.
“The vast majority of what we’ve learned — we’ve learned from deCODE, the UK Biobank, some efforts in the United States and largely populations of European descent, which are the ones that have been well sampled,” Bustamante said. “Could we do better by broadening that base of genomic information?”
Jeff Gulcher, Galatea’s chief medical officer, helped found and lead scientific operations at deCODE until 2013. The Icelandic company mined genetic data from tens of thousands of people in its native country and elsewhere to identify risk factors for dozens of diseases. Amgen bought deCODE for $415 million in 2012.
Chief technology officer Francisco De La Vega used to be a VP at Tempus AI, and his expertise will help shape how Galatea’s biobank can be used with AI and machine learning efforts in drug discovery. “We need to bring more data so that the models can refine and get to the added complexity and dimensionality of global human genetic variation,” the Galatea CEO said.
Galatea is about 10% to 15% of the way through its 10 million target for the global biobank.
“I’d love to get there before the end of the decade,” Bustamante said. “We might get there a little bit sooner than that.”
Galatea has already forged collaborations with hospitals and other medical centers in North America and Latin America, and it’s working to expand to Africa and other regions of the world. The company has 23 full-time employees.
Bustamante characterized the 10 million target as a “big, hairy, audacious goal,” noting that building a biobank is complex. The UK Biobank, for example, has recruited hundreds of thousands of people over two decades in order to collect a vast
web of patient information,
including genetics, imaging data, physical activity and pain questionnaires and many other data points.
“The variancy in genetic material is actually biggest in the African continent, but there’s not a lot of research around that,” said Wale Ayeni, a Galatea board member and managing partner at Helios Digital Ventures, which focuses on the African startup ecosystem and plans to help with Galatea’s expansion in Africa.
The data that Galatea want could be used by life sciences companies, including pharma, and could be “actionable for not just Africa but for the world,” Ayeni said.
“You can invest in a platform that starts to, in my view, democratize the access to a global dataset for everybody that is in drug discovery to partner with,” he said, adding that could lead to more efficacious drugs and a more efficient discovery process.
Bustamante points to the higher risk of prostate cancer for African American men than men of European descent as an example.
“It has to do with certain background germline variants that are higher frequency,” he said. “So the degree to which we can disentangle this will help us really accelerate discovery that benefits everybody.”