Sirtris Pharmaceuticals: Living Healthier, Longer "You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred. " Woody Allen One Saturday in February 2007, Dr.
David Sinclair and Dr. Christoph Westphal co-founders of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge, MA-based life sciences firm, navigated the company’s narrow hallways and cramped offices to a conference room for their regular weekend strategy planning session.When they reached the conference room, Sinclair and Westphal reviewed their activities during the past week. Sinclair, who was an associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and co-chair of Sirtris’s Scientific Advisory Board, had had interviews with Charlie Rose, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek.
Westphal, who was Sirtris’s CEO and vice chairman, had closed a $39 million round of financing, bringing the total amount of invested capital in the company to $103 million.Sinclair and Westphal were riding a wave of interest generated, in part, by their company’s promising research into age-related diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. The company’s research into disease, however, only partly explained its appearance on the covers of Scientific American, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal.
