Our Management Team

Mr. Ellsworth has spent his career bringing high technology systems solutions to the life science industry. He joined Trellis in 2003 to bring to reality the company’s CellSpot™ platform now responsible for generating a pipeline of totally human therapeutic antibodies directly from human blood. The platform blends life science technology in cell and molecular biology with state-of-the-art microscopy, software, and nanotechnology. Prior to Trellis, Mr. Ellsworth was the VP R&D and Chief Operating Officer at First Medical, a point-of-care cardiac diagnostic company acquired by Sigma in 2000. This was preceded by a role as Vice President of Engineering at Becton Dickinson where he was responsible for developing through commercial release numerous flow cytometry products which now dominate that market. He holds a degree in Bioscience Technology from the University of California Santa Cruz, a BA from Dartmouth in Engineering and Mathematics, and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Dr. Kauvar is an entrepreneur and scientist who founded Trellis and was previously the founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Telik, a small molecule drug company focused on oncology. He holds 40 US patents for methods, tools and drug compounds and is one of the inventors of CellSpot™, Trellis' core technology. Dr. Kauvar holds a PhD from Yale in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, did his postdoctoral studies at Caltech and holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University.

Dr. Usinger is a project leader, inventor and entrepreneur with expertise in drug development, assay development and validation, and technology evaluation and licensing. Dr. Usinger was the Founder and President of Immusine Labs and Cofounder and Vice President of R&D of Metabolex Corporation. For the past 12 years, Bill has worked in the field of monoclonal antibody discovery and development and served as the Department Head of ImmunoBiology at FibroGen and as Research Director in the Department of Biotherapeutics at Chiron/Novartis. Dr. Usinger received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin (Immunology) and studied vaccine immunomodulators during his Post Doctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley. Dr. Usinger has more than 55 publications and holds numerous US patents and applications.

From 2004 Dr. Posada was the Senior Vice President of Business and Market Development for GlycoFi, Inc., a biotechnology company spun out of Dartmouth College. During his tenure at GlycoFi, Dr. Posada structured and negotiated company transforming deals with Eli Lilly & Co. and Merck & Co., ultimately leading to the 2006 sale of the company to Merck in the largest all-cash transaction to date. Prior to GlycoFi, Dr. Posada was the Senior Director of Business Development at Protein Design Labs, Inc. where he was responsible for structuring and negotiating both in-licensing and out-licensing transactions with pharmaceutical partners. From 1998-2002 Dr. Posada was with Eli Lilly & Company, serving on the management team of the therapeutic proteins division. There Dr. Posada completed assignments in New Product Planning and worked closely with Lilly’s Corporate Business Development team structuring and negotiating several key R&D collaborations and in-licensing transactions with biotech partners.