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 CEO’ operating in the Genetics space. If you think a CEO’ 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.
Avi Lasarow
CEO Europe, Middle East & Africa of Prenetics
Avi Lasarow is a multiple award-winning South African entrepreneur referred to by the media as ‘a lifestyle genetics pioneer’ known for his work associated with DNA testing. Avi is currently founder and CEO of genetic testing company DNAFit Life Sciences, which conducted the worlds 1st peer-reviewed and published clinical trial using both genetics and exercise interventions. In 2011 he became the youngest person to be appointed Honorary Consul for South Africa to the United Kingdom by His Excellency President Jacob Zuma. Avi was recently named African Businessman of the year in London at the African Enterprise Awards, his company DNAFit has won numerous awards, including the Lloyd’s Bank National Business Award for Innovation of the Year in 2015, winner at the UKActive Flame Awards and an award for Innovation at the South African Chamber Awards. Most recently, DNAFit was named as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative in the field of Data Science.
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About DNAFit, Prenetics: Prenetics is a genetic and diagnostic health testing company that helps identify health risks with the use of a DNA sequencing technology.
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.
Robert Habib
Chief Executive Officer of MiNA Therapeutics
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About MiNA Therapeutics: MiNA Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing therapeutic medicines to harness gene activation mechanisms.
Bobby Gaspar
Chief Executive Officer of Orchard Therapeutics
Bobby is Professor of paediatrics and immunology at the UCL Institute of Child Health and Honorary Consultant in paediatric immunology at Great Ormond Street Hospital, London. He has a special interest in the treatment of severe primary immune deficiencies, including bone marrow transplantation, gene and cell therapy. He has led multiple clinical trials that have shown that gene therapy can successfully correct the genetic defect in immune deficiencies. Bobby is currently leading UK and European-wide initiatives for newborn screening in severe combined immune deficiency. He is Director of the Centre for Research in Rare Diseases in Children (CRRDC), a new academic and clinical facility that will open at Great Ormond Street in 2018.
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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.
Sergey Musienko
CEO of Atlas Biomed Group
Sergey Musienko is a technology expert with over a decade’s worth of experience, specifically in the health sector. He is the CEO of Atlas Biomed, the personalised health company. Sergey took time out to join the Silicon Valley think tank, Singularity University, in 2011. It was here that Sergey realised that the future was, in his words, “integrative personal omics profiles, which gather information about the body at a molecular level”. This insight led to him to found Atlas Biomed where he is currently the CEO. Here, he has put together a successful team that has developed two major products: the Atlas DNA Test and the Atlas Microbiome Test. These tests analyse how genes and gut bacteria influence various health traits like disease risk, nutrition, personal traits and physical activity, allowing people to take control of their health with actionable, scientifically proven lifestyle recommendations.
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About Atlas Biomed Group: The Atlas DNA and gut microbiome tests evaluate your health status and provide personalised recommendations to improve wellbeing.
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.
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
