Christoph Westphal

Christoph Westphal, M.D., Ph.D., is a biomedical entrepreneur.

He finished the MD–PhD program at Harvard University in six years.

He worked at McKinsey & Company for two years after getting his degrees.

From 2000 to 2005 he was a partner at Polaris Venture Partners, a venture capital firm.

In 2001, he worked with Robert Langer and other scientists to found Mimeon based on work by Langer on glycoengineering; the company changed its name to Momenta Pharmaceuticals the next year and went public in 2004. Westphal was the founding CEO. Momenta brought the first generic, low-molecular-weight heparin to market.

In 2002 he co-founded Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which was built to discover and develop drugs and reagents based on RNA interference based on work done by scientists Phillip Sharp, Paul Schimmel, David Bartel, and Thomas Tuschl; John Maraganore was the founding CEO. The company held its IPO in 2004, one of the few biotech companies able to do so in a down market. As of 2016 Alnylam remained the dominant company in the RNAi field.

In 2003 he co-founded Acceleron Pharma with scientists Jasbir Seehra, Tom Maniatis, Mark Ptashne, Wylie Vale, and scientific advisor Joan Massague, and John Knopf; Westphal served as founding CEO. The company was founded to discover and develop drugs based on the scientific discoveries of the scientific founders in the field of growth factors and transforming growth factors in the fields of metabolic disorders like obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, and muscle-wasting conditions. The company went public in September 2013.

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