Fiona Nielsen of Repositive

Digital Biotech

Fiona is a bioinformatics scientist turned entrepreneur. Having worked at Illumina developing tools for interpretation of next-generation sequencing data and analyzing cancer genomes, she realized the main bottleneck for genome interpretation and precision medicine is accessing the right data, and so decided to disrupt outdated practices with the aim of accelerating drug discovery. In 2013 Fiona founded DNAdigest as a charity, to promote best practices for efficient and ethical data sharing and, in 2014, she co-founded Repositive to develop an online community platform and global exchange for genomic data. Fiona’s familiarity with the industry ensured that Repositive’s products – two to date, the Discover and Cancer Models platforms – would provide data access solutions while also respecting the industry need for privacy, data governance and IP protection, and this awareness was fundamental in securing £3M+ investment and support from early partners including AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, XenTech and Shanghai LIDE Biotech.