Dr Deborah O’Neil FRSE
Chief Executive Officer and Scientific Officer, Novabiotics
Deborah invents and develops new medicines for life-threatening and life-limiting diseases. These are inflammatory, respiratory and infectious diseases caused by bacteria, fungi and also viruses. She is the Chief Executive and Scientific Officer of NovaBiotics Ltd, the company she founded in 2004 in order to research and study the therapeutic potential of these new medicines, through laboratory testing and in clinical trials in healthy volunteers and patients. The medicines that she is developing are novel classes of therapy for a range of socioeconomically significant conditions including pneumonia caused by COVID, drug-resistant bacterial infections, life-threatening fungal infections and cystic fibrosis.
The therapies she has invented are based on the effector molecules that are deployed by the body’s immune system as a first line of defence against infection by bacteria and fungi and as a means of resolving the inflammatory consequences of viral and bacterial infection. There is an urgent need for new medicines to combat infectious and inflammatory disease. We are in the midst of a global antimicrobial resistance crisis and must be prepared for any future viral pandemic.
