Petra, a rescued Russian Blue cat, has had her DNA fully sequenced six times and extracted nearly 60 times, making her a flagship example of how Darwin’s Ark uses pet data to advance science. More than 67,000 cats and dogs have had their information entered by human caretakers into Darwin’s Ark databases, pairing genomic profiles with detailed surveys about behavior, play, sociability, and quirks such as zoomies after using the litter box. Founded in 2018 by data specialist and serial entrepreneur Charlie Lieu and geneticist Elinor K. Karlsson, the nonprofit invites owners to contribute both DNA samples and behavioral observations, solving a core problem in human medicine by generating the enormous quantity of data needed to understand and eventually tackle complex diseases while avoiding many of the privacy and compliance hurdles that limit human studies.
Drawing on experience from the Human Genome Project at the Broad Institute and a personal history marked by extensive cancer in her family, Lieu helped design Darwin’s Ark as a scalable big data platform for pet genetics. Using its dog data, Karlsson and collaborators at the Broad and other institutions showed that just 9% of variations in dog behavior can be predicted by breed, a result that undercuts common stereotypes and may help much maligned breeds such as pit bulls. Darwin’s Ark has also contributed to translational cancer research: early work using dog blood draws to detect cancer helped demonstrate that such minimally invasive tests were viable, and an FDA-approved blood test is now available for humans to figure out whether or not they have lung cancer, with roots in the dog studies. The project expanded to cats in 2024, and researcher Chad Nusbaum developed a method to extract DNA from naturally shed fur or hair rather than mouth swabs or plucked follicles, a breakthrough that improves animal welfare and could unlock new, low stress tools for conservation genomics in endangered species.
Committed to open science, Lieu and Karlsson structured Darwin’s Ark as a nonprofit and make its data available free to researchers, while a new grant is funding a unified public portal to simplify access to sequence datasets that are currently scattered across repositories. Lieu’s broader career traces a consistent big data thread through roles at Amazon, where she created an evolutionary algorithm to dynamically optimize warehouse fulfillment, and through startups such as AirTerra, a logistics company that was officially founded in 2020, quickly achieved unicorn status, and was acquired by American Eagle Outfitters in 2021. She has also applied a data driven approach to social issues, cofounding SafeOutside after a survey she initiated exposed widespread sexual assault in the climbing community and helped lead to the conviction and life sentence of climber Charlie Barrett. Now 50 and stepping back from day to day operations at Darwin’s Ark while remaining on its board, Lieu is reassessing how to use her skills for maximum impact, focusing on economic inequality and reproductive health access, which she sees as tightly interlinked with ecology and sustainability.
