About Us
Our Mission and Vision
Lodestar's purpose is to enhance the wellness of others.
In pursuit of this purpose, our first goal is to build a patient-controlled marketplace for rare disease genomic data so that every patient with a rare disease can expect a diagnosis.
Our Leadership
CEO
Jessime has worked at the intersection of basic life science and applied human health for 15 years. During his PhD, he won an NSF GRFP, published in Nature Genetics, and worked on Cloud Health at Google. Subsequently, he held various roles at Invitae, most notably leading the bioinformatics team to launch Invitae's whole genome-based rare disease product.
CTO
Ben has been building genomics companies for over a decade. He played key roles in the early success of multiple genomic diagnostic startups: he was one of the first engineers at Guardant Health, a bioinformatics lead at Invitae, and most recently, the Director of Bioinformatics at AccuraGen. Ben specializes in turning critical business problems into scalable software platforms.
Our Story
Lodestar was founded in 2023, primarily inspired by Jessime's previous experience building a genomic assay for pediatric rare disease. He learned that a majority of children who take these tests don't receive a diagnosis. Although these tests are expensive, even when they produce indeterminate results, the genomic data they generate is rarely leveraged to its full extent.
Jessime and Ben decided to found Lodestar to give more people with rare diseases another chance at a diagnosis. By connecting patients to already existing teams in both the diagnostic and therapeutic space, Lodestar is working to ensure that a patient's genomic data is ultimately used to create treatments and cures.