2024 Emerging Innovator of the Year

Yuan Liu, an assistant professor in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine and a member of the University of Pittsburgh Aging Institute, is the recipient of the Emerging Innovator Award for her extraordinary dedication to innovation commercialization. Her research focuses on the development of small molecule therapeutics that target ubiquitin-dependent protein degradation in age-related diseases, a natural cellular process that breaks down unwanted proteins for recycling. This process plays a key role in many disease conditions, and Liu’s work aims to modulate protein degradation to treat specific diseases. In 2023, she was one of four faculty members from the Aging Institute to receive grants from the Richard King Mellon Foundation for a project focused on late-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Liu is also a co-founder of Generian Pharmaceuticals Inc., launched by UPMC Enterprises in 2020. In 2022, Generian entered into a strategic collaboration and license agreement with Mitobridge, a subsidiary of Astellas Pharma Inc., to discover and develop novel small molecules for therapeutic targets in diseases with limited treatment options.

University of Pittsburgh Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship