Dede Willis is President and CEO and a cofounder of Orbit Genomics™. She has over 25 years of international leadership experience in life science start-ups. She has expertise in strategic planning & execution, product development and launch, capital project management, FDA and CE Marking regulatory processes for drugs & devices, sales & marketing, and forecasting, budgeting & financing. She has successfully taken multiple life science products from concept to commercialization including diagnostic tests and therapeutics. She was responsible for several capital projects including cGMP manufacturing facilities, research laboratories and CLIA laboratories.
She has served as CEO, COO or Director of numerous life science startups in the US and Germany. Prior to cofounding Orbit Genomics, Dede was a Director of Panion Animal Health, AB, an animal health therapeutics company listed on a Swedish stock exchange until its acquisition by CombiGene AB. She was cofounder and COO of Boulder Diagnostics, a company with operations in Boulder, Colorado and Mellrichstadt, Germany whose technology was acquired by Oxford Immunotec. She was Vice President of Operations of Miacom Diagnostics GmbH (now OneWorld Diagnostics GmbH). ). She was COO of Proligo LLC, a joint venture between Gilead and Degussa AG, and CEO of its wholly owned subsidiary, Proligo Biochemie Hamburg GmbH, now part of Sigma Aldrich. Dede, Skip and Mikael first worked together when Dede was with Proligo and she purchased a MerMade Oligo Synthesizer from Skip’s company, BioAutomation, and both were working with Mikael’s company, Exicon A/S.
Dede started her career with the former Hoechst Group (now Sanofi, Celanese and DuPont) where she worked in several corporate start-ups in the U.S. and Germany, gaining operational experience in every functional role and across multiple industries. She began her career in an aerospace startup where she developed her passion for startups and later pivoted to life sciences after her father was diagnosed with cancer.
Dede has an Executive MBA from the University of Houston and a B.Sc. Degree in Chemical engineering from Clemson University, but her real education comes from a career in global startups.