Co-Founder, Scientific Team
Frank is Chief Science Officer of Tract Bio and oversees research and development for drug discovery and regenerative medicine. He is also Professor of Cancer Biology at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Charlotte, North Carolina. Before moving his laboratory to Charlotte, Frank was the Director of the Somatic Stem Cell Center at the University of Houston and an Established Investigator at the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). His work in Houston focused on developing novel therapies that target pathogenic stem cells to treat chronic inflammatory diseases and cancer. Frank received his doctorate and postdoctoral training in Biochemistry and Biophysics with developmental biologist Marc Kirschner at the University of California, San Francisco before joining the faculty at the Harvard Medical School, where he worked for 23 years. At Harvard, Frank was the first to clone the p63 and p73 genes, homologs of the tumor suppressor p53 gene mutated in most human cancers. His p63 "knockout" model in mice led to the surprising result that p63 is not a tumor suppressor but rather a master regulator of stem cells of all stratified epithelia. The monoclonal antibodies McKeon generated against p63 are used in the diagnosis of nearly all prostate and breast cancers in an FDA-approved test he developed. In 2008 Frank left Harvard to become a Senior Group Leader of Stem Cell and Developmental Biology at the Genome Institute of Singapore, where he focused, along with his partner, Dr. Wa Xian, on developing technology to clone normal and pathogenic epithelial stem cells. While in Singapore, he and Dr. Xian along with other researchers, also identified early markers for metaplasia in Barrett’s esophagus, a precursor to esophageal cancer. Prof Frank McKeon was born in New Haven, Connecticut and received his BA from Pomona College.
