Jon Ellman, Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Pharmacology in the Yale Faulty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) was one of 14 Yale faculty members awarded with a Yale Faculty Innovation Award earlier this month. The event was held at Yale Ventures and recognizes the exceptional contributions of faculty investigators whose inventions were licensed to startup companies and funded during fiscal year 2023. Attendees included FAS Dean Tamar Gendler, President Peter Salovey, Provost Scott Strobel, Deans of various colleges, and other university officials.
Tamar Gendler and Jon Ellman
Ellman’s contribution was with Onsero, a biopharmaceutical startup company, licensed compounds with unique pharmacological activity developed by Dr. Jon Ellman and his colleagues. Ellman’s innovative work, published in Nature, fills a void in mental health treatment: it enables the development of meaningful drugs or neuropsychiatric indications. Onsero is using this technology to develop a new class of medicines to treat complex mental illness.
Ellman, Onsero, and collaborators from UNC-Chapel Hill and UCSF, have developed a drug discovery engine focused on the neurobiology of the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, which is implicated in depression and other mood disorders that affect more than 21 million American adults and 3.7 million youth each year. This fiscal year, Onsero received an impressive round of funding to support this important work.
