The geneticist Ignacio Zarante (Bogotá, 57 years old) wanted to become an aviator or devote himself to the hotel industry and tourism. “What’s interesting is what I do now: traveling and staying in hotels,” jokes this doctor of biological sciences, son of a coastal civil servant and a teacher from Caldense, and leader of a team that, a little more than two decades ago, revolutionized the Colombian health system’s fight against congenital malformations, the main cause of death among children under the age of one.
The news of his election as one of the 100 new leaders of Colombia 2025 surprised him in Murcia (Spain), in the middle of a genomics congress that he helped organize. He would then travel to Hong Kong to meet the other 26 members of the commission. The Lancet on Rare Diseases, an initiative by the prestigious British scientific journal aimed at providing recommendations that improve the conditions of those who suffer from these diseases. And a few weeks ago, I received more good news. The jury of the National Science and Solidarity Awards, awarded by the Alejandro Ángel Escobar Foundation, awarded him the Physical, Exact and Natural Sciences award for his “significant contribution to public health, scientific knowledge and the formulation of evidence-based policies”.
Zarante studied medicine with the curious motivation of playing a very important role in the event of a global catastrophe. His first love in college was research, which got him into trouble with doctors at Bogotá’s San Ignacio University Hospital, who frequently pressured him to see more patients and do fewer “strange things.”
Faced with the impossibility of doing his internship in immunology as he wanted, he turned to genetics on a rebound. And he fell in love again: “I saw it as a science of the future, one that integrates biology with medicine and answers the fundamental questions of why we get sick or why we are healthy. And when I started caring for patients, I realized the positive impact we can have on people with catastrophic illnesses and their families.
He immersed himself in the field of congenital malformations by creating the medical-surgical specialization in genetics at the Javeriana University, the first that existed in Colombia and which has just celebrated its 25th anniversary. Seeking data to support the Ministry of Education on the relevance of the academic program, he discovered that statistics on genetic diseases were very scarce. To begin to fill this gap, San Ignacio Hospital enrolled in the Latin American Collaborative Study of Birth Defects (ECLAMC), a network of medical centers established in 1967 to collect standardized data on these anomalies.
In 2004, when Zarante was already a national leader in his field, the Ministry of Health approached him. The government in the capital was concerned because the infant mortality rate was stagnating, after several years of decline, largely due to deaths from birth defects. That same year, the District and the Javeriana Institute of Human Genetics, led by it, agreed to undertake a process to extend the “case-control” methodology applied in San Ignacio to the entire city.
Since then, each time a baby is born, a doctor examines it according to the ECLAMC protocol. If you detect a defect (like a cleft palate), you record it as a “case.” The next healthy baby of the same sex born in this hospital will be the “control”. After comparing the medical records, we identify the differences that may be linked to the problem observed, in particular those linked to the behavior and conditions of the mothers during pregnancy; for example, alcohol or tobacco consumption, exposure to toxic substances or folic acid deficiency. This process is essential to find possible causes and risk factors.
“Once we managed to have these little ones counted by public health, we insisted that they have a better quality of life, because when they return home, they are very fragile and many die because of the barriers of the health system,” emphasizes Zarante. “Every day, nurses at the Secretariat call mothers of children with very specific malformations (like Down syndrome and heart disease) and help them solve problems, most of which are not doctors: ‘My husband left me and I was left without insurance,’ ‘The EPS gave me an appointment in three months and the doctor told me I had to see my son in a week,’ ‘I have no money for go to echocardiography’…”.
Over the years, the benefits of this systematic study have been more than proven. Between 2010 – when it began to be measured throughout Bogota – and 2024, the mortality rate from congenital malformations in children under 5 years old fell by less than half, from 68.7 to 32.4 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2012, the initiative was integrated into the national public health surveillance system.
Additionally, analysis of samples taken over these years by Zarante and colleagues identified genes and DNA alterations associated with skull and facial malformations, as well as genitourinary abnormalities. “We are very proud of our publications in scientific journals, but what gives us the most pleasure is resolving the daily difficulties of the mothers of these children,” he confesses.
Loving his patients, genetics, his wife and his daughter, who is studying to follow in his parents’ footsteps, he says that his most important position is that of coordinator of the first semester of medicine and admits that what he loves most is teaching. “My grandfather was a teacher in Neira. The school in this municipality of Caldense is named after him: Abraham Montoya Calderón. In my case, teaching is genetic.”
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