From founder population to foundational discoveries
Newfoundland and Labrador is home to a powerful resource for medical research—its founder population.
This unique genetic architecture amplifies signals for discovery, illuminating high-impact genetic variants with causal links to disease that are lost in the noise of other populations.
Why Newfoundland and Labrador?
Discoveries we make here are validated by deeply integrated genetic, clinical, and genealogical evidence: a gold standard approach made possible in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Lifetime of clinical context
We leverage unified health records to build deep, longitudinal phenotypes, and link a participant's genetics to decades of real-world clinical history. This view provides a lifetime of context on a variant's health impact for a better understanding of real-world outcomes and new strategies for precision medicine.
Causality through generations
Deep genealogical records allow us to do what most researchers can't: trace a specific variant and a disease together as they're passed down through generations. This family-based validation moves beyond statistical association to provide powerful, real-world evidence of actual cause and effect—a level of proof that isn’t feasible in populations that lack Newfoundland’s deep genealogical context.