Elia is a visionary leader with a passion for innovation in healthcare, tech, and life sciences and 20+ years of experience across industry, academic and clinical settings. He is currently a board member of Genialis, an AI drug discovery company.

He served on the SAB of Alkahest, a regenerative medicine company later sold to Grifols, and Healx, a UK fast-growing AI driven biotech company. He is an advisor to fast growing startups ranging from biotech to health-tech and deep tech such as Duality Technologies (Israel), Entropica Labs (Singapore), Cardea Bio (US), Pulse Infoframe (Canada), Etcembly (UK), Raremark (UK), as well as not for profits such as RebootRX (Boston) and the Esperare Foundation (Switzerland).

Prior to Angelini Ventures, Elia was the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Life Sciences business unit at Health Catalyst prior and through its IPO, a leading provider of data and analytics technology and services to healthcare organizations. At Health Catalyst, Elia lead the creation of the life sciences business and contributed to the growth of the company in Asia-Pacific. His U.S. based experience also includes a role as Senior Director of Data Science & Bioinformatics at the Dana- Farber Cancer institute, one of the world's leading research cancer organizations. He led computational biology, genomics and data science at Boehringer Ingelheim, where he was closely involved in external innovation efforts globally with innovative start-ups and labs.

Elia started his career as an academic as a member of the first team that annotated the human genome in Cambridge, U.K., in 1999-2001. He then worked with Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner to build the first genome research group in Singapore. Subsequently, Elia worked at several key European research organizations including as co-director of the genomics research center at San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, Italy. At San Raffaele, he contributed to the successful development and completion of the first commercially viable gene therapy clinical trials in Europe.

Elia’s work has contributed to the understanding of the human genome and transcriptome, the diagnosis of rare disease patients, the development of gene therapy and of novel drugs, and to the development of ethics frameworks pertaining to the fast-changing world of big data in health and biology. 

Elia holds a PhD in Computer Science from Leiden University and a Master of Research and Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of York.