Jason Ehrlich

All In, On Sight

Ollin takes its name from an Aztec glyph for motion. It also happens to sound like "all in." Both readings are deliberate. The company Jason Ehrlich co-founded in 2023 and unveiled to the world in September 2025 is a wager on a single idea: that the drugs millions of people inject into their eyes to hold onto their vision can be beaten - made to work faster, deeper, and cleaner - by someone who knows exactly how the incumbents were built.

Ehrlich knows, because he helped build them. For a decade at Genentech and its parent Roche, he sat at the center of retina drug development. He was lead clinician for Lucentis in diabetic eye disease, work that supported the first-ever FDA approval of an intraocular drug for diabetic macular edema. He guided faricimab - the bispecific antibody the world now knows as the blockbuster Vabysmo - into global Phase 3. He shepherded a drug-delivery acquisition into the Roche machine and ran a Phase III program spanning 1,800 patients across more than 20 countries.

Now the man who helped write Roche's retina playbook is using it against them. In early 2026, Ollin announced that its lead molecule, OLN324, had gone head-to-head against faricimab in a randomized trial - and won.

The Head-to-Head

Most biotech startups avoid measuring their experimental drug directly against the market leader. It is the riskiest thing you can do: if you lose, the data is public and unforgiving. Ehrlich chose to do exactly that. The JADE study enrolled over 160 patients with diabetic macular edema or wet age-related macular degeneration and randomized them between OLN324 and faricimab.

OLN324 dried retinas roughly 75% more than faricimab at Week 1 and about 50% more at Week 12. And it did so cleanly: zero cases of intraocular inflammation across the entire study, against one in the faricimab arm. Ollin says it will move to global Phase 3 in DME and wet AMD in 2026. The full results were presented at the Angiogenesis, Exudation, and Degeneration symposium in February 2026.

Two Bispecifics

From Princeton to the Roche War Room

Ehrlich's training reads like a straight line aimed at exactly this. An A.B. in molecular biology, summa cum laude, from Princeton. An MD and a PhD from Stanford, both earned through the NIH-funded Medical Scientist Training Program - the dual-degree track for people who want to treat patients and run the experiments that change how patients are treated. Then an ophthalmology residency, also at Stanford. He is a doctor who can read a retinal scan and design the Phase 3 trial that gets a drug approved.

The Year It All Went Sideways

2023 was supposed to be the year Kodiak's lead retina therapy crossed the finish line. Instead it failed two late-stage trials. Ehrlich, the chief medical officer who had spent five years guiding that program, handed in his notice. For a lot of people, that is the off-ramp - a quiet move into advising, or a different therapeutic area, anywhere the scar tissue is thinner.

He did the opposite. The same year, he co-founded a company in the exact field where he had just absorbed a public loss. The bet behind Ollin is not that Ehrlich got lucky once at Genentech. It is that he understands, better than almost anyone, both how these drugs win and how they fail - and that the difference between the two is operational discipline, the right molecule, and the nerve to test it against the best.

There is a particular kind of confidence required to leave the company that made the market-leading eye drug, watch your next program collapse, and then choose to compete head-on with the very drug you helped usher toward approval. Ehrlich has now stood on every side of this business: the bench scientist running the experiment, the clinician injecting the drug, the development officer designing the pivotal trial, and the CEO raising the money and carrying the risk. Each role taught the same lesson from a different angle - in retina medicine, the data is the argument. So he built a company whose entire thesis is to generate the cleanest, most direct data possible, and to do it in public, against the best the field has.

Why Eyes, Why Now

Wet age-related macular degeneration and diabetic macular edema are the two leading causes of vision loss in the developed world driven by leaky retinal blood vessels. The treatment is brutal in its logic: a needle into the eye, repeated every one to two months, often for the rest of a patient's life. The drugs that dominate this routine - Lucentis, Eylea, and now Vabysmo - have generated tens of billions of dollars. The retinal-therapeutics market sits around $15 billion worldwide. It is enormous, and it is crowded, and it has a clear king.

That is precisely the kind of market a purpose-built challenger wants. The disease biology is validated, so the science risk is lower. The patients are identified, so the trials are tractable. And the bar to beat is public and quantifiable: dry the retina more, dose less often, inflame nothing. Ehrlich's pitch is not that Ollin has discovered a new pathway. It is that Ollin can execute a known pathway better - the VEGF and Ang2 targets are the same ones faricimab hits, only OLN324 hits them harder, at a higher molar dose.

It is a deeply unsentimental strategy, and that is the tell. Ehrlich describes Ollin as "asset-centric" and obsessed with "operational execution, market-informed clinical development strategies, and cutting edge data science and imaging tools." Translated: find the molecule with the best odds, run the trial that proves it against the leader, and let the imaging data do the talking. Ollin did not invent OLN324 from scratch - it is co-developed with Innovent Biologics in China, where it carries the name IBI324. The second program, OLN102, comes through a partnership with VelaVigo. This is a company designed to develop and win, not to discover for discovery's sake.

Who Bet On Him

The $100 million that launched Ollin in September 2025 came from a syndicate that does not write checks lightly: ARCH Venture Partners, Mubadala Capital, and Monograph Capital led the round. The board reflects the same gravity. Paul Berns of ARCH chairs it. Jason Coloma, co-founder and CEO of Maze Therapeutics, sits on it. So does Fred Cohen, a founder of Monograph Capital, and Travis Murdoch, CEO of Braveheart Bio, as an independent director. These are people who have built and sold biotechs before. They did not back a first-time operator chasing a hunch. They backed a physician-scientist who has run the gauntlet from molecule to FDA approval and came out the other side knowing where the bodies are buried.

Co-founding alongside Ehrlich is Atul Dandekar. Together they built Ollin in Austin, Texas - not Boston, not the Bay Area, the two cities that usually claim biotech's center of gravity. The choice of Austin is its own small statement about doing things differently.

Things You'd Only Know If You Asked

• "Ollin" is an Aztec glyph for motion. It also doubles as a nod to going "all in" on new eye medicines.
• His MD and PhD came together through Stanford's NIH-funded Medical Scientist Training Program - a single track for physician-scientists.
• The lead drug carries two names: OLN324 at Ollin, IBI324 at its Chinese co-developer Innovent Biologics.
• Ollin's board chair is Paul Berns of ARCH; the cap table reads like a who's who of biotech venture.
• Ehrlich helped bring faricimab toward the market at Roche - the very drug OLN324 was designed to outperform.
• The second program, OLN102, targets thyroid eye disease, a completely different corner of ophthalmology.