A fearless pioneer of gene therapy
Elizabeth "Liz" Parrish is the Founder and CEO of BioViva Sciences, a biotechnology company working to extend healthy human lifespan through gene therapy. A mother and humanitarian, she came to this field not to live forever, but because her son was diagnosed with a serious condition — and she realised the tools to do better already existed.
In 2015 she became known as "patient zero" — the first person to undergo experimental gene therapy to target aging itself, choosing two genes: telomerase reverse transcriptase and follistatin. In 2020 she went further, adding klotho and PGC-1α. BioViva now works to combine these into a single, more precise delivery platform.
Liz is a leading advocate for democratizing access to longevity medicine and for treating aging as a modifiable medical condition. She is the originator of the Best Choice Medicine (BCM) framework — a proposed pathway to responsibly accelerate patient access to therapies for age-related disease.
An entrepreneur, author and global speaker, she has appeared at forums including WIRED and TEDx, and has spent years sharing her own experience to help people understand the science and potential of gene therapy.
