Michelle Dipp

The El Paso, Tex. native already had the resume of a biotech wunderkind: she graduated from the University of Oxford with an MD and PhD, went on to serve as vice president of Cambridge-based Sirtris Pharmaceuticals – where she engineered the sale of the company to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million – and eventually headed up GSK’s specialized R&D unit, the Centre of Excellence for External Drug Discovery (CEEDD). In 2011, after seeing multiple friends struggle with fertility issues, she co-founded OvaScience to bring to market a breakthrough innovation that uses a woman’s own mitochondria to “revitalize” older eggs before they’re fertilized, improving embryo quality for in-vitro fertilization. So far, ten babies have been born using the technology, and the company is on track to start commercializing the product next year—except in the U.S., where the FDA has yet to approve it. For now, Dipp has shifted her focus to slowing biological clocks overseas, where large markets in Japan and the Middle East are promising.