Keith O. Elliston, Ph.D., is the president and CEO of the tranSMART Foundation, a non-profit organization providing a global, open-source knowledge management platform for scientists to share pre-competitive translational research data. He was a key member of the Foundation’s founding team, initially serving as the chief scientist and head of business development. Keith is an experienced scientist and entrepreneur with expertise in the development and growth of new life science and technology ventures, from both operational and investment perspectives. As a scientist, Keith specializes in systems biology and data sciences. He recently built and managed the systems biology program for CHDI, the Huntington’s disease foundation, and is also a consulting science director for Orion Bionetworks.
Keith is the co-inventor on three different life science patents, has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed scientific publications, has spoken at numerous industry events, and has been a contributor to more than 280,000 sequence entries in Genbank.
As an entrepreneur, Keith has played a key role in the founding of more than a dozen biotech ventures. He is co-founder and CEO for Virtual-Rx, a virtual pharma platform company; was co-founder, president and CEO of Selventa (originally Genstruct), a venture-backed systems biology platform company; was CEO and co-founder of Viaken Systems, a venture-backed informatics service provider; was SVP of R&D and CSO for Gene Logic (Nasdaq:GLGC), among others.
Keith began his career at Merck, where he built and led the bioinformatics and genomics programs, and ran the Merck Gene Index, a privately-funded public genome effort that published the first sequence for 90 percent of expressed human genes. Keith has successfully built biotechnology businesses from startup through IP, and established profitable and capital-efficient companies working both with venture capital and as a founder or advisor. Keith combines extensive experience in pharmaceutical R&D, biotechnology, information technology, and data science with successful executive and team leadership into a unique set of skills that drives innovation and value.
Keith is a graduate of the Marino Institute Mindshare Program, where he received the MindShare Millionaire Award in 2001. He earned his Ph.D. in molecular genetics from Rutgers University, an M.S. in genetics from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities and a B.A. in biology from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.
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