Unlock Your DNA Secrets: How This AI Startup Is Revolutionizing Personalized Health

The Future of Health Is in Your Genes

Imagine asking a search engine platform questions about your health and getting responses based on your own DNA. That's exactly what the founders of Bystro have created—a groundbreaking AI platform that's being called "ChatGPT for genetics."

What Is Bystro?

Bystro is an artificial intelligence genomics research assistant that combines elements of Ancestry.com, search engines, and primary health care into comprehensible takeaways for researchers, doctors, and individuals. Users can ask their genetics direct questions like:

• Why am I not responding well to my medication?
• Why do I have high testosterone?
• Why do I have recurring cases of gout?

Instead of receiving broad, sometimes unnecessarily disconcerting information from general health websites, Bystro generates answers based precisely on the user's genetics. This platform is being honed in the Boston Seaport space of MassChallenge, a nonprofit that supports and accelerates entrepreneurship.

Bystro, an AI 'direct consumer genetics' platform, is a startup company led by, from left, Alex Kotlar, Cristina Trevino and Mason Alban. They work out of the MassChallenge space in Boston's Seaport. (Hadley Barndollar)

The Brains Behind Bystro

Alex Kotlar, Bystro's CEO and co-founder, has a personal connection to genetics. As an immigrant from Ukraine whose family fled the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, he witnessed family members grow increasingly sick with cancer, leading him to pursue a Ph.D. in genetics at Emory University. It was there that the seeds for Bystro were sown.

"I had this idea to make a Google-like search engine for genetics," Kotlar said. "I saw what Google was able to do: index the world's information and make it so that I could ask a question and get a reasonable answer. And I thought, well, I could just do that for genetics."

He met co-founder Cristina Trevino at Emory, where she was also studying genetics. She was instantly drawn to the Bystro pitch, saying, "I was like, 'Everybody should be using this.' I want genetics to be accessible for everybody."

Completing the trio is Mason Alban, a former actor who battled long-standing health issues. When he ran his DNA through Bystro, he was "blown away" to learn about gene variants affecting his hearing loss and response to gout medication, as well as discovering he was lactose intolerant. The company's goal, Alban said, "is to give everyone agency over their health."

How 'ChatGPT for Genetics' Works

Bystro analyzes complex genetic data—likely inaccessible to anyone without an advanced genetics education—and provides insights in plain English based on user prompts. It enables people to ask sequences of questions about a set of DNA and receive specific answers regarding genetic observations, potential diagnoses, risk prediction, medications, ancestry, and more.

"A person doesn't come with an instruction manual," Kotlar said. "Everybody's unique. And so if you're actually doing tailored therapies and tailored diagnosis, you have to be able to respond dynamically to that person's unique profile."

Still in its early launch stages, Bystro aims to be offered to researchers and universities, doctors, and then individual users. The team is already contracting with Emory, UC Davis, and the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Genetics Consortium.

Importantly, every response generated by Bystro comes with a disclaimer: the findings should be reviewed with a physician or clinical pharmacist who has expertise. They should not be used to self-diagnose and self-medicate.

AI Explosion in Health Care

Artificial intelligence is already reshaping health care internationally. A Research Insights report estimated the global market was valued at $26.6 billion in 2024 and could reach $187.7 billion by 2030, a growth of 38%.

Massachusetts is working to bill itself as a national artificial intelligence hub, and given the state's top health systems, a marriage between the emerging technology and medicine is perhaps inevitable. AI is increasingly being used in hospital settings, from interpreting results to drafting patient notes to analyzing scans.

However, AI's rise in health care hasn't come without controversy—particularly debates over ethics, potential inaccuracies, and data privacy concerns. Some worry AI will eventually be used to replace the expertise and personal touch of human medical professionals.

Can Bystro Keep the DNA Private?

Kotlar acknowledges privacy concerns, especially in the wake of the 23andMe bankruptcy case that followed a data breach. He emphasizes that Bystro doesn't hold onto the genetic data that fuels the platform's findings.

"It gets deleted right away," he said. "It gets transformed into the way that Bystro needs it and then gets discarded. And the dataset that's there is your dataset. It's like you've uploaded something to Google Drive, and you can just delete it."

Bystro has the ability to translate DNA ranging from just one person to a dataset of hundreds of thousands of individuals. If it reaches its full potential, Kotlar thinks it could "change precision medicine worldwide."