Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top Cambridgeshire based Founder operating in the Biotechnology space. If you think a Founder is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Michael Anstey
Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Proteorex Therapeutics Inc.
Michael Anstey is an Investment Director specialising in healthcare investments. Before joining CIC he was a Principal in the Healthcare Practice Area at The Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) Toronto office. Michael has experience in advising multinational healthcare businesses across North America, Europe, India, and Japan on a broad range of topics, including corporate strategy, sales and marketing, new launches, R&D and medical strategy, and M&A. Michael was co-founder and COO of an early stage biotechnology company focused on developing small molecule drugs that target protein-protein interactions implicated in disease. Prior to BCG, Michael worked in venture capital, where he focused on investing in early stage healthcare and life science businesses. Michael earned his DPhil in Zoology in the field of neurobiology, jointly supervised by professors at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford. Michael sits on the board of Bicycle Therapeutics.
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About Cambridge Innovation Capital, Proteorex Therapeutics Inc.: Expanding horizons to find cures
Tom Simmons
Founder & CEO of Supplant
Tom has over 10 years of experience in carbohydrate biochemistry. He formerly held fellowships at the University of Cambridge and at the World Economic Forum and has advocated sugar reduction initiatives through Sky News and Channel 4 television appearances.
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About Cambridge Judge Business School, Supplant: Supplant is a biotechnology platform that makes sugar substitutes.
Mark Kotter
Founder/CEO of bit.bio
Mark Kotter is the founder and CEO of bit.bio.
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About bit.bio: Bit.bio specializes in the fields of coding and biology that determine the identity of every human cell.
Tom Henley
Founder and CEO of Empyrean Therapeutics
Tom Henley is the founder and CEO of Empyrean Therapeutics.
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About Empyrean Therapeutics: Empyrean Therapeutics develops next generation cell therapies to enable global and affordable cures for diseases.
Hannah Sore
Founder and CEO of PharmEnable
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About PharmEnable: PharmEnable has developed a rapid and cost effective way to identify better chemical starting points to drive the discovery.
Paulina Chilarska
CEO & Founder of Cambridge Biolabs
Chilarska’s cutting-edge work at the University of Cambridge was funded by the prestigious 4-Year Wellcome Trust PhD award in Stem Cell Biology. Already at the age of 21 she worked with the Nobel Prize winner Sir Professor Paul Nurse on the cell cycle thus investigating the mechanisms underlying carcinogenesis. Dr Chilarska is an expert in the molecular basis of ageing and strongly believes that ageing is a disease which can be prevented and treated. She is currently wirting a book describing her revolutionary approach to Ageing Prevention and Ageing Reversal. She is fluent in five languages and has international consulting experience.
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About Cambridge Biolabs: Biotech-meets-tech startup developing personalised skincare solutions
Paulo Garcia
CEO & Co-Founder of Kytopen
Dr. Paulo A. Garcia co-invented the Flowfect™ technology while he was a Research Scientist at MIT. He is currently leading the development and commercialization efforts of the proprietary cell engineering platform for therapeutic and biotechnology applications.
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About Kytopen: Kytopen developer of a cell therapy platform for non-viral delivery of molecules into hard-to-transfect immune cells.
Nick Morrell
CEO and co-Founder of Morphogen-IX
Nick is the British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiopulmonary Medicine at the University of Cambridge, based in the Department of Medicine. He has 25 years of experience working in the field of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), and is the Research Director of the National Pulmonary Hypertension Service at Papworth Hospital. His research spans clinical translational studies, experimental medicine, genetics, cell and molecular biology and preclinical models of disease. He has published over 200 papers in this field and is an internationally recognised authority on the pathobiology of PAH.
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About Morphogen-IX, Papworth Hospital, University of Cambridge: MORPHOGEN-IX Limited is a drug discovery company founded in 2015 by Index Ventures to develop bone morphogenetic proteins
Wei Li
Co-Founder of Morphogen-IX
Wei Li, Co-Founder at MORPHOGEN-IX LIMITED.
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About Morphogen-IX: MORPHOGEN-IX Limited is a drug discovery company founded in 2015 by Index Ventures to develop bone morphogenetic proteins
Abel Ureta-Vidal
Chief Product Officer & Founder of Eagle Genomics
With more than 12 years bioinformatics experience and a scientific background in molecular biology and immune-virology (PhD from the Pasteur Institute, France), Abel first mastered bioinformatics tools and code in the early 90s whilst working on viral phylogenetic studies. After his PhD, he joined the effort at Genoscope (Evry, France) in ramping up the human genome project, putting in place the automatic gene annotation system for human chromosome 14. In 2001, Abel moved to the European Bioinformatics Institute (Cambridge, UK) where he led the Ensembl comparative genomics team until 2007. He founded Eagle shortly before graduating from the Cambridge Judge Business School MBA program in 2008.
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About Eagle Genomics: Eagle Genomics is a enterprise software solutions company to enable the management, orchestration and exploitation of life sciences data.
Eoin McKinney
Chief Scientific Officer & Co-Founder of PredictImmune
Eoin is a Wellcome-Beit intermediate Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge and an honorary consultant in nephrology and transplantation in Cambridge University NHS hospitals Foundation Trust. He obtained a first-class degree in pre-clinical medicine from Keble College, Oxford University in 1999 and graduated in clinical medicine with honours from Edinburgh University in 2002. His primary interest is the use of systems immunology approaches to translate high throughput analyses of autoimmune disease datasets into clinical practice.
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About PredictImmune: Providing tools to physicians in the treatment of patients with immune-mediated disease, through prediction of long term clinical prognosis.
Kenneth Smith
Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer of PredictImmune
Professor Ken Smith is Professor of Medicine and Head of the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. He trained in nephrology (FRACP, FRCP) and clinical immunology (FRCPA) and completed a PhD at the WEHI in Melbourne. His laboratory runs a translational programme in autoimmune disease (particularly inflammatory bowel disease, vasculitis and SLE) that has led to the discovery of a novel prognosis-predicting biomarker currently in clinical trials and the identification of genes and pathways involved in disease pathogenesis.
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About PredictImmune: Providing tools to physicians in the treatment of patients with immune-mediated disease, through prediction of long term clinical prognosis.
Paul Lyons
Vice President of Platform Delivery & Co-Founder of PredictImmune
Paul is a Principal Research Associate in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. He has over 25 years of experience in molecular and cellular biology including Senior Scientist positions in the Dept. Medical Genetics, University of Cambridge, Dept. Surgery, University of Oxford and the Rosalind Franklin Centre for Genomics Research. His primary research interest is the application of high throughput genomic approaches to better understand the genetic and molecular basis of autoimmune disease.
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About PredictImmune: Providing tools to physicians in the treatment of patients with immune-mediated disease, through prediction of long term clinical prognosis.
Tuomas Knowles
Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Fluidic Analytics
Professor Tuomas Knowles holds a personal Professorship in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and is also a Fellow of St John’s College Cambridge. Tuomas received his PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge, and has held positions in Engineering in Cambridge and Harvard University before returning to Cambridge as a University Lecturer in 2010, Reader in 2013 and then Professor in 2015. His current research interests are focused on using physical approaches to study the self-assembly of protein molecules both in the context of disease and for the synthesis of novel functional biomaterials. Tuomas has received a number of distinguished awards, most recently from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Newman Foundation and the European Research Council, and has co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed scientific articles.
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About Fluidic Analytics, Transition Bio: Fluidic Analytics designs, develops and manufactures tools that seek to revolutionise the way proteins are characterised.
Chris Torrance
Co-Founder and CEO of PhoreMost
Chris has significant oncology research and development experience, including six years as a senior manager at Cambridge-based pharmaceutical company, Vernalis. His principle expertise lies in cancer cell biology and drug discovery. In this field, he has led project teams taking drug targets from inception through to hit identification, lead optimisation and into preclinical studies. Chris holds a PhD from East Carolina University and completed a Post-Doctoral position in the world renowned oncology laboratory of Professor Bert Vogelstein (Johns Hopkins University) where he pioneered the use of X-MAN™ cancer models in high-throughput screening and drug discovery.
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About PhoreMost: PhoreMost is a new-model drug discovery company based in Cambridge, UK.
Eric Miska
Co-Founder of Storm Therapeutics
Eric is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Genetics and a Senior Group Leader at the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge. He has an appointment as associated faculty at the Cambridge Systems Biology Centre and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute. Eric was an EMBO Young Investigator and is a full member of EMBO since 2012. Eric is the 2013 recipient of the Hooke Medal awarded by the British Society of Cell Biology. He joined the faculty of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton in 2014 and is a Senior Investigator of the Wellcome Trust. Eric studied mathematics, physics and biology at Heidelberg, Berlin and Mainz and holds a BA in Biochemistry from Trinity College, Dublin. He received his PhD in Pathology from the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2000, working with Professor Tony Kouzarides, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Bob Horvitz at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA from 2000 to 2004. He started his own research group at the Gurdon Institute in 2005.
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About Storm Therapeutics, University of Cambridge: Targeting pathways that modify RNA to deliver novel cancer therapeutics
Shankar Balasubramian
Co-Founder and Director of Cambridge Epigenetix
Sir Shankar is Founder of two companies and the principal inventor of the leading next generation human genome sequencing technology core to all Illumina sequencing platforms, estimated to be worth >$30BN. Sir Shankar’s technology has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality, has revolutionised biology and accelerated the development of genomic personalised medicine. Sir Shankar is the Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute. His awards include the Royal Medal (2018), the RoyalSociety Mullard Award (2009), The BBSRC Innovator of the year (2010) and the Tetrahedron Prize (2013). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences and a member of EMBO.
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About Ahren Innovation Capital, Cambridge Epigenetix: Cambridge Epigenetix is using epigenetics to reduce several routine & important diagnostic tests for common cancers to a simple blood draw.
Thomas Weaver
Founder & CEO of PetMedix
Tom holds a PhD in Experimental Oncology and has served in a variety of research, technology development and commercial roles. He has a proven track record of creating value in highly successful start-up companies applying genome-based technologies and contract services for fundamental research, clinical, and drug discovery purposes. He has also led large infrastructure programs in genomics and animal model genetics, serving as a Director at the Medical Research Council (Oxford, UK). He trained at the University of Cambridge and MRC Lab for Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK), and the University of Wisconsin Medical School, (Madison, USA).
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About PetMedix: PetMedix is a pet therapeutics startup.
Adrian Fisher
Director and Co-Founder of Stemnovate
Co-founder and director, Adrian Fisher has over 20 years experience in the design, development, and application of integrated Microsystems, covering areas ranging from energy storage through to biological analysis. Adrian Fisher heads the electrochemical and micro engineering group in Cambridge in the Centre for Research in Electrochemical Science and Technology, and also within the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise in Singapore.
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About Stemnovate: Drug Screening and Safety Testing Platforms
Ruchi Sharma
Founder and CEO of Stemnovate
Ruchi Sharma is driven by her passion for taking the benefits of research, and applying them to products and technology in order to make a significant and positive difference in the real world. Alongside over ten years experience in stem cell research, physiology, and biotechnology, Ruchi Sharma obtained a PhD from the world-renowned Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a post-doctorate in the exciting field of cellular reprogramming at the University of Cambridge.
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About Stemnovate: Drug Screening and Safety Testing Platforms
George Foot
Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Sixfold Bioscience
George Foot is the Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Sixfold Bioscience.
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About Sixfold Bioscience: Sixfold Bioscience develops and researches on biotechnology advances for RNA therapies.
Andy Fraser
Co-Founder of Camena Bioscience
Andy Fraser is the co-founder of Camena Bioscience. He is also a professor of Molecular Genetics at The University of Toronto. He was a faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and performed training at the University of Cambridge and Cold Spring Harbor. Andy received his undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. from University College London.
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About Camena Bioscience: Camena Bioscience is a synthetic biology company that develops tools to engineer new synthetic biology applications.
Derek Stemple
CTO and Co-Founder of Camena Bioscience
Derek Stemple is the CTO and co-founder of Camena Bioscience. He previously held senior positions at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and was a lab head at the National Institute for Medical Research. Derek holds a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.
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About Camena Bioscience: Camena Bioscience is a synthetic biology company that develops tools to engineer new synthetic biology applications.
Jenny Tillotson
Founder & Creative Director of eScent
Jenny Tillotson is the creator and driving force behind eScent, an enabling platform technology and delivery device that emits precise doses of fragrances at the right time, in the right place, depending on context. This is highly scalable technology for sensing and dispensing scent and liquids, providing a new sensory awareness with wide‐ranging applications in fashion, fragrances for luxury brands, wellbeing, digital health, AR/VR, retail, sports, entertainment, learning and adult industry. Jenny spent 14 years at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London developing her award-winning eScent research and was made a Reader in Sensory Fashion in 2013. More recently Jenny has moved to commercialise her research. She formed a company that works at the intersection of fashion, fragrance, smell and wearable technology, co-founded with Professor Andreas Manz, a pioneer of lab-on-a-chip and winner of the EU ‘lifetime achievement’ inventor award for patents on microchip technology for chemical applications. Jenny’s involvement over the past year has specifically been in the area of fine fragrance for the fashion industry and digital health for stress and sleep disorders with a particular focus on leveraging disparate data sources to discover more accurate health-related correlations. The company holds 4 granted patents and 1 pending patent that creates an exclusive market position on wearable sensory data collection related to the sense of smell, pharma and insect control. Jenny has a degree in Fashion Communication from Central Saint Martins and a PhD in interactive olfactory surfaces (Printed Textiles) from the Royal College of Art. She has been a Fellow of the of the Royal Society of Arts since 2009, a Fellow of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust since 2013 and an Associate of the British Society of Perfumers since 2005. Jenny is also a Visiting Scholar in the Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge and a STEM Ambassador. Prior to her academic work she was a fashion stylist in the media and worked as a Sensory Designer for Charmed Technology (MIT Media Lab spin-off). She has exhibited internationally, published in science and design journals, consulted for NIKE, Unilever, INTEL, Qualcomm, Toyota and worked with Philips, Cambridge Consultants, The North Face, Adeline André and International Flavours & Fragrances.
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About eScent, The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA): Wearable technology and sensory data collection for preventative healthcare.
Jane Osbourn
Co-Founder, Chief Scientific Officer & Chief Technology Officer of Alchemab Therapeutics
Jane Osbourn is the chairman at Mogrify.
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About Alchemab Therapeutics: Alchemab Therapeutics is developing natural protective antibodies designed to keep people free of hard-to-treat diseases.
Alberto Bardelli
Founder of Horizon Discovery
Alberto Bardelli is a professor at the University of Torino, He is also a Researcher and co-founder of Horizon Discovery, which is a successful British biotech company.
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About Horizon Discovery: Horizon is a gene editing company that designs & engineers genetically-modified cells, applying them to advance human health.
Patrick Short
CEO & Co-Founder of Sano Genetics
Co-Founder and CEO of Heterogeneous, a genetic data sharing platform dedicated to providing researchers with access to high-quality and dynamic genetic and medical data while empowering users to own and control their own data. https://www.heterogeneous.co.uk/
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About Sano Genetics: Sano Genetics is a personalised medicine research platform with data privacy and transparency at its core.
William Jones
CTO & Co-Founder of Sano Genetics
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About Sano Genetics: Sano Genetics is a personalised medicine research platform with data privacy and transparency at its core.
Gordon McInroy
Founder and CTO of Nuclera
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About Nuclera: Nuclera makes biology accessible through desktop enzymatic protein and gene synthesis.
Rod Richards
Founder, CEO of VHSquared
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About VHSquared: VHsquared is dedicated to the development of novel antibody domains engineered to be stable in the GI tract.
David Fairen-Jimenez
Founder of Tarsis Technology
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About Tarsis Technology: Tarsis Technology develop and commercialise biotechnology technology.
David Nugent
Co-Founder and Chief Commercialisation Officer of Colorifix
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About Colorifix: Colorifix is the first company to use a biological process to produce, deposit and fix pigments onto textiles.
Stewart Newlove
Founder of Antibodies.com
Stewart Newlove is the Founder of Antibodies.
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About Antibodies.com: Antibodies.com is a leading supplier of protein research tools. Discover more from our range of distinct antibodies, proteins, and assays.
Steve Taylor
Founder of Celbius
Steve Taylor is the founder of Celbius.
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About Celbius: Celbius is a specialist technology company that develops ultrasonic technology for the bioprocessing industries.
Steve Taylor
Founder of Celbius
Steve Taylor is the founder of Celbius.
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About Celbius: Celbius is a specialist technology company that develops ultrasonic technology for the bioprocessing industries.
