22 Jun 2026

The Genetics Revolution, Made Real: Professor Sir Peter Donnelly, Genomics

Read about our President's Award finalists: Economy Award finalist, Professor Sir Peter Donnelly, CEO, Genomics

Professor Sir Peter Donnelly has spent a career at the frontier of human genetics, and he has used that position to pursue an ambitious and increasingly realisable goal: the prevention of common chronic disease at population scale. Few scientists of his standing have chosen to leave academia at its peak to build the commercial infrastructure needed to turn their research into healthcare reality. Peter did exactly that, and the implications for patients, for the NHS and for the UK's life sciences sector are profound.

His academic record is exceptional. A Rhodes Scholar, appointed to a professorial chair at 29, he led the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, the largest study of the genetic basis of common diseases at the time of its publication, involving over 60,000 participants across more than 20 conditions. He led the genotyping of UK Biobank, pioneered whole genome sequencing in clinical medicine through the WGS500 project, and helped lay the groundwork for the NHS 100,000 Genomes project. His papers have been cited more than 100,000 times.

In 2014, Peter co-founded Genomics and subsequently stepped down as Director of the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics to lead it as CEO. His conviction was that the science of genomic risk prediction had matured to the point where it could change how healthcare works, shifting the emphasis from treatment to prevention. Under his leadership, Genomics has built the world's largest harmonised genotype-phenotype data resource, developed the UK's first UKCA-marked and MHRA-registered polygenic risk score products, and secured its position as the exclusive PRS provider for Our Future Health, the UK's largest health research programme. A clinical trial embedding polygenic risk scores within NHS primary care workflows has demonstrated that the technology works not just in research settings, but in real GP surgeries with real patients.

The potential scale of impact is striking. Research published in Nature Communications has shown that PRS-guided screening across seven common diseases could identify more than a quarter of the adult population as being at high genetic risk for at least one condition. In cardiovascular disease alone, the technology could identify 1.9 million additional high-risk individuals and prevent over 45,000 heart attacks and strokes across a decade, saving the NHS more than £235 million in the process. The NHS has now committed in its 10 Year Plan to rolling out polygenic risk score technology by 2035, the direct result of sustained advocacy by Peter and the Genomics team.

Named among Britain's fastest-growing private tech companies in both the 2025 and 2026 Sunday Times 100Tech rankings, Genomics is a company built on decades of scientific rigour, a clear-eyed understanding of what it takes to scale technology through a complex health system, and a leader who was willing to take the risk that translating world-class science into world-changing healthcare required.

To read more about the techUK President's Awards, visit our page here. Winners will be announced at the techUK Annual Dinner on 30 June.

The Genetics Revolution, Made Real: Professor Sir Peter Donnelly, Genomics

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techUK Annual Dinner 2026