Keith Bostian

Keith Bostian, Ph.D., is the Dean of NJCSTM and the Technology Transfer Office at Kean as well as a founder and CEO of the Institute for Life Science Entrepreneurship. He is an entrepreneur scientist with a distinguished career in industry and academia.

Bostian has held senior executive positions in numerous life science companies.  At Kemin Industries, he was President of a European pharma subsidiary, developing and launching the proprietary probiotic Anaban™ in European markets.  Bostian also built one of India’s leading preclinical CROs, Vanta Bioscience. He was a founder of Mpex Pharmaceuticals, a development-stage pharmaceutical company with discovery, preclinical and late clinical stage programs in the infectious disease arena, founder and CEO of Iconix Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a pioneer and leader in the emerging field of chemogenomics, and founder and COO of Microcide Pharmaceuticals, Inc.  At Merck, Bostian served as the Head of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, with responsibility for antimicrobial drug discovery as well as discovery of new leads from natural products for all of Merck’s worldwide drug discovery programs.

Bostian is the inventor of numerous drug discovery and genomics patents, and has led efforts resulting in several clinical candidates including a first-in-class new anti-fungal antibiotic caspofungin (marketed as CANCIDAS®), which was taken into development under his leadership at Merck, and an aerosol fluoroquinolone (Aeroquin®, Quinsair (EU), developed at Mpex for cystic fibrosis MDR infections. Quinsair was recently approved in Europe and Canada and is pending approval in the US. 

Dr. Bostian has worked with and advised over 40 biotechnology companies the US, Europe and South Asia.  He has served on numerous advisory and editorial boards, most recently the NIH BARDA and Welcome Trust CARB-X Accelerator. He earned his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of London. He is a fellow of the American Academy for Microbiology, has served as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow and on the faculty at Brown University.