United Kingdom's 31 Most Impressive & Successful Founders in the Genetics Space

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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 United Kingdom 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.

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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.

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

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.

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.