Dr Shakiba Kaveh

Dr Shakiba Kaveh is the co-founder and CEO of Mitra Bio, a London-based biotechnology company pioneering non-invasive skin epigenetics testing for longevity research and skincare. Of Iranian heritage, Kaveh holds a PhD in Materials Science from the University of Cambridge and spent five years as a management consultant before her work in the skincare industry gave her first-hand insight into how significant the gap was between the complexity of skin ageing and the tools available to measure it. Her experience at a major skincare company — witnessing the industry’s struggle to generate objective, human-tissue-derived data on product efficacy — became the founding insight for Mitra Bio.

Kaveh co-founded Mitra Bio in 2020 with Dr Cristiana Banila, combining her industry and commercial expertise with Banila’s academic background in epigenetics diagnostics. The company’s platform uses a proprietary tape-stripping technique to collect epigenetic data non-invasively from human skin — eliminating the need for biopsies that cost over £2,000 per sample and require lengthy ethics approval processes. The resulting dataset enables the construction of biological aging clocks for skin, measuring markers of inflammation, UV damage, and cellular aging rate in ways that no other platform can replicate from living human tissue at scale. Mitra Bio’s MitraClock is the world’s first skin-specific epigenetic aging clock, grounded in over 400 validated samples and published in the British Journal of Dermatology.

Under Kaveh’s leadership, Mitra Bio has conducted over 10 clinical trials with global skincare companies, completed a melanoma screening collaboration with Guy’s Hospital, and sponsored the world’s largest aging research conference, ARDD. The company raised £4.7 million to scale its non-invasive diagnostics platform into pharmaceutical, aesthetic, and longevity medicine markets — pursuing Kaveh’s conviction that skin ageing should be treated as a disease, not accepted as inevitable.