Lifebit
Profile of Maria Dunford, CEO, Lifebit for the Pride CEO (Global Technology Magazine) special edition featuring the “10 Inspiring Women Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2024″
Dr Maria Dunford is the CEO and Co-Founder of Lifebit, a global leader in precision health data and software. Together with Dr Pablo Prieto Barja, her Co-Founder and CTO of the company, Maria created Lifebit to ensure that all data that can be used to cure and prevent disease is used.
Maria is a biotech entrepreneur who has founded two companies: Innovation Forum and Lifebit. As Lifebit’s CEO, Maria has led Lifebit to become one of the industry’s fastest growing companies and the biggest disruptor, securing contracts with high-profile clients across the life sciences sector, including Genomics England, Synapse (Singapore’s National HealthTech Agency) and Boehringer Ingelheim.
Listed as a Top 100 future unicorn to watch by Financial Times’ Sifted, Maria has led Lifebit to raise over $70 million in capital funding, including 95 billion dollar venture capital firm Tiger Global.
Maria’s leadership has been highlighted across multiple outlets, including Beauhurst’s “Top 50 Female Entrepreneurs to Watch for 2022”, Business Leader’s “Top 32 UK’s Biggest Exporters”, and Fortune Greece’s Top “40 under 40”. A frequent speaker at international conferences such as BioData World and high-profile outlets like The Economist and TechCrunch, Maria is a thought leader who is shaping precision medicine and precision drug discovery.
Maria is leading Lifebit to solve global health challenges through data. Using health data helps researchers to better understand diseases and health conditions, such as understanding their causes and symptoms or knowing how many people are affected. Data provides ways of identifying people most at risk of becoming ill, diagnosing diseases earlier, and identifying and discovering new treatments and vaccines.
However large-scale data required for health research is difficult to find and access. With a data network of over 100M patient datasets – the deepest and most diverse clinico-genomics data resources in the world – combined with its patented federated technology, Lifebit is solving this problem. This is enabling researchers worldwide to securely access, connect and analyze valuable real world, clinical and genomic data in a compliant manner. The aim is that this leads to new drug discoveries and potential cures for diseases in the future.
