San Diego’s Connect Names Pharma Executive Greg McKee as CEO

Greg McKee image used with permission

Connect, San Diego’s nonprofit program that supports technology innovation and entrepreneurship, today named Greg McKee, a healthcare and financial industry executive, as CEO. He is the fourth leader at Connect, an organization founded in 1985 to help innovators start and build new biotech and technology companies.

McKee, 50, succeeds the late Duane Roth, who led Connect for nearly seven years. Roth died Aug. 3 from a head injury he sustained while bicycling in the Cuyamaca Mountains east of San Diego.

Like Roth, McKee has spent most of his career in the life sciences industry. In a statement released this afternoon, Connect says McKee was a co-founder of Global Bio-Link, a specialty pharmaceutical company that worked to commercialize new drugs in markets outside the United States.

McKee’s LinkedIn history shows he’s been working more recently as the founder and chairman of GMcK Ventures, a La Jolla investment and advisory company focused on healthcare and technology innovation—and as a managing director at STS Capital Partners, an international investment banking firm in La Jolla.

Greg McKee
Greg McKee

Before starting Global Bio-Link in 2012 with former executives of Genzyme’s international division, McKee served as the chairman and CEO of Akela Pharma and its predecessor company, Nventa Biopharmaceuticals. Akela officially ceased operations last year. Previously, McKee held roles as the head of corporate development at Valentis, and in senior management roles with Genzyme Corporation in the U.S. and Asia. He lived and worked in Singapore and Japan for nine years and speaks fluent Japanese.

ViaCyte CEO Paul Laikind, who is currently chairman of the Connect Foundation, said in the statement from Connect: “Finding a strong, visionary new leader for the organization after Duane Roth’s tragic accident was a challenge. With the appointment of Greg McKee as Connect’s CEO I believe that challenge has been met. I look forward to

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.