Dr. Marielle S. Gross serves as the founder and CEO of de-bi, co., where she leads a multidisciplinary team dedicated to transforming biobanking through an innovative combination of bioethics, blockchain and privacy-preserving technologies. de-bi enables a decentralized model of biospecimen donation and research engagement, ensuring greater transparency, accountability, and inclusion in biomedical research by creating a biomedical metaverse that unites all people and specimens, wherever they go. Dr. Gross’s leadership reflects her overarching mission to embed structural justice into health systems thinking and technology by maximizing mobile and digital health innovations to enable more patients, physicians, and scientists to collaborate effectively.
Beyond her entrepreneurial work, Dr. Gross is an Assistant Professor of Bioethics (Adjunct) at Johns Hopkins University and a rural OBGYN. Her scholarship addresses ethical, legal, socioeconomic, and technological dimensions of learning health systems, including implications of de-identification, third-party “ownership” of patient data, and the application of distributed ledger technologies for patient-centered biobanking. She advanced the foundational theory underlying decentralized biobanking through a number of high impact publications and as a named inventor on the following patents: “Non-fungible token system for ensuring ethical, efficient and effective management of biospecimens,” and “Systems and methods for digitally connecting patients to de-identified research specimens and data using composable protocols and tokenized identifiers.”
Dr. Gross completed her undergraduate degree in Moral Philosophy at Columbia University, a second undergraduate degree in Ethics at the Jewish Theological Seminary, a master’s degree in Bioethics at New York University, followed by an M.D. with honors in research from the University of Florida. Recognizing the disparities in the evidence basis for women’s health and inspired by the potential to rapidly close the gap in the era of digital medicine, Dr. Gross went on to residency in GYN/OB at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. This was followed by a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, where her pioneering research on de-identification and the potential for new technology to preserve patient privacy while maximizing utility, value and respect for biosamples, created fertile ground for the solutions we are advancing today.