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 London based Founder operating in the Genetics 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.
Maria Chatzou Dunford
CEO and Co-Founder of Lifebit
Dr. Maria Chatzou, CEO of Lifebit, is a biotech innovator and a proud geek, expert in bioinformatics, medical informatics and high performance computing. She is also a passionate entrepreneur and has founded two companies, Innovation Forum Barcelona and Techstars-backed Lifebit. Prior to Lifebit, she was a researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, in Barcelona, where she was designing and deploying tools and methods that facilitate the analysis of Big Biomedical Data, allow for biological discoveries, and promote personalised medicine. She was part of the developing team of Nextflow, a programming framework that is revolutionising the computational analysis of genomic data and setting the foundations for personalised medicine computational analyses. Maria is also a frequent industry speaker and has spoken in many international conferences on the subjects of docker containers, genomics workflows, the computational challenges of personalised medicine, AI and HPC in genomics, women in leadership, entrepreneurship, science ventures, among many other topics.
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About Lifebit: Lifebit CloudOS is the intelligent genomics platform that is the industry standard for unified, secure research over distributed big data.
Pablo Prieto Barja
CTO and Co-Founder of Lifebit
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About Lifebit: Lifebit CloudOS is the intelligent genomics platform that is the industry standard for unified, secure research over distributed big data.
Andrea Spezzi
Chief Medical Officer & Co-Founder of Orchard Therapeutics
Andrea is a co-founder of Orchard Therapeutics and brings to the company extensive experience and expertise in the development and execution of all aspects of clinical development and particularly in paediatric rare diseases. Prior to joining Orchard Therapeutics, Andrea served as VP and Medicine Development Leader at GSK Rare Diseases Unit. Previous to joining the GSK Rare Diseases Unit, Andrea was Senior Medical Director at the Immune Inflammation Discovery Performance Unit. Before GSK, Andrea was Global Medical Director R&D at Takeda in the metabolic and cardiovascular area and in charge of the paediatric developments for Takeda Europe R&D. Before that, she worked as Research Physician at Hammersmith Medicines Research. Before moving to the pharmaceutical industry Andrea practiced as a paediatrician for 12 years in Argentina, Spain and UK. Andrea obtained her medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and completed residency in paediatrics and post graduate training in paediatric immunology at the Dr Elizalde Children’s Hospital in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She obtained a Specialist in Pharmaceutical Medicine degree from University of Basel, Switzerland and she is a Fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine in London, UK (FFPM).
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About Orchard Therapeutics: Orchard Therapeutics is a biotechnology company dedicated to transforming the lives of patients through innovative gene therapies.
Alex Zhavoronkov
Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Insilico Medicine
Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine (insilico.com), a leader in next-generation artificial intelligence technologies for drug discovery, and biomarker development. He is also the founder and CEO of Deep Longevity, Inc, a global company developing a broad range of artificial intelligence-based biomarkers of aging and longevity. Since 2015 he invented critical technologies in the field of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning (RL) for generation of the novel molecular structures with the desired properties and generation of synthetic biological and patient data. He also pioneered the applications of deep learning technologies for prediction of human biological age using multiple data types, transfer learning from aging into disease, target identification, and signaling pathway modeling. Under his leadership Insilico raised over $50 million in multiple rounds from expert investors, opened R&D centers in 6 countries and regions, and partnered with multiple pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and academic institutions. Prior to founding Insilico, he worked in senior roles at ATI Technologies (acquired by AMD in 2006), NeuroG Neuroinformatics, Biogerontology Research Foundation. Since 2012 he published over 130 peer-reviewed research papers, and 2 books including “The Ageless Generation: How Biomedical Advances Will Transform the Global Economy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). He serves on the editorial boards of Aging Research Reviews, Aging, Trends in Molecular Medicine, Frontiers in Genetics, and co-chairs the Annual Aging Research, Drug Discovery and AI Forum (7th annual in 2020) at Basel Life, one of Europe’s largest industry events in drug discovery. He is the adjunct professor of artificial intelligence at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
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About Deep Longevity, Insilico Medicine: Insilico Medicine develops an AI platform for drug development to treat cancer and age-related diseases.
Victor Dillard
Founder , COO & CEO of Desktop Genetics
A former chemical engineer keen on seeing personalized treatment realized, Victor has spent the past three years leading Desktop Genetics’ business development and CRISPR genome-editing initiatives. He has closed several partnerships with leading life science companies, placing Desktop Genetics at the forefront of CRISPR therapeutics research. Informed by his previous experience at P&G, GlaxoSmithKline, Flagship Ventures, Victor believes that software will be the key to unlocking the full potential of biotech R&D. He holds MEng, Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London and an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise from the University of Cambridge.
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About Desktop Genetics: Desktop Genetics is an international company to help researchers discover and treat the root genetic causes of human disease.
Raj Mehta
Co-Founder & CEO of Adendra Therapeutics
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About Adendra Therapeutics, Apple Tree Partners: Adendra Therapeutics wants to use new insights into dendritic cell biology to develop a novel type of immunotherapy.
Caetano Reis e Sousa
Co-Founder of Adendra Therapeutics
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About Adendra Therapeutics: Adendra Therapeutics wants to use new insights into dendritic cell biology to develop a novel type of immunotherapy.
Sophia Karagiannis
Scientific Founder of Epsilogen
Sophia is a Reader in translational cancer immunology at KCL and a globally-recognised expert on the use of IgE antibodies to fight cancer. She co-founded and Chairs the Task Force on AllergoOncology and her group collaborates closely with the CRUK Centre for Drug Development. She holds a PhD from King’s College London.
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About Epsilogen: Epsilogen is a developer of an immuno-oncology company intended to develop immunoglobulin antibodies to treat cancer.
Philipp Boeing
Co-Founder of Bento lab
Philipp Böing is a Co-Founder at Bento Lab.
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About Bento lab: Bento·lab is a powerful, personal laboratory that enables scientists, artists.
Bethan Wolfenden
Co-Founder of Bento lab
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About Bento lab: Bento·lab is a powerful, personal laboratory that enables scientists, artists.
Jorge Cortell
Founder and CEO of Kanteron Systems
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About Kanteron Systems: Transforming patient care through the combination of medical imaging and clinical genomics
