Michelle Dipp

Michelle Dipp, M.D., Ph.D., (b ca. 1976) is a biotech business executive and venture capitalist. As of 2017 she was co-founder and executive chairwoman of OvaScience, an In vitro fertilisation services and company, and founder and partner of Longwood Fund, a healthcare venture capital firm.

Michelle Dipp was raised in El Paso, Texas and earned her MD and PhD from the University of Oxford; her dissertation was on pulmonary hypertension.

After graduating from Oxford, Dipp went to work for Wellcome Trust in its private equity division. Wellcome was an early investor in Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, which was founded in 2004 by scientist David Sinclair, venture capitalist Christoph Westphal, serial entrepreneur Andrew Perlman, Richard Aldrich, Richard Pops, and Paul Schimmel. The company focused on resveratrol formulations and derivatives as activators of the SIRT1 enzyme. The company's initial product was called SRT501, and was a formulation of resveratrol. Westphal and Sinclair aggressively marketed investment in the company as an anti-aging opportunity, which was controversial but effective; the company raised $100 million in 2006.

Westphal recruited Dipp to join Sirtris in 2005 and she became the Vice President of Corporate Development.

Sirtris went public in 2007 and was subsequently purchased and made a subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline in 2008 for $720 million; Westphal remained CEO of the subsidiary and was also appointed senior vice president of GSK's Center of Excellence for External Drug Discovery (CEEDD).

In 2008, Dipp worked with Westphal, Aldrich, and Alexey Margolin to found Alnara Pharmaceuticals, which was created to develop ways to formulate biopharmaceuticals so they could be taken by mouth, instead of by injection. Margolin had been CEO of Altus Therapeutics, which had been developing liprotamase, which it had licensed from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, but ran out of money. Alnara acquired the license and focused its resources on further developing liprotamase; Eli Lilly and Company acquired Alnara in July 2010 on the promise of that data acquired by Alnara. Lilly submitted a new drug application to the FDA in 2011, which the FDA rejected, finding no clear benefit over existing products and requiring an additional clinical trial. Lilly took a $122.6 million write-down on the value of the asset, and then sold it to Anthera Pharmaceuticals in 2014.

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