Technology 6 min read By Bethany Hadley
Cellular Intelligence recruits Bob Langer and Yann LeCun to board
Moderna co-founder Robert Langer and Turing Award-winning AI researcher Yann LeCun have joined the scientific advisory board of Cellular Intelligence, a Boston startup building AI models of living cells to speed up drug development. The company also holds global rights to STEM-PD, a Phase 2-ready Parkinson's cell therapy.
Cellular Intelligence has recruited two of the most prominent figures in biotechnology and artificial intelligence to its scientific advisory board, as the Boston-based company seeks to apply AI models to the behaviour of living cells and accelerate the development of new medicines.
Robert «Bob» Langer, co-founder of Moderna and an MIT Institute Professor, and Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning AI researcher, are joining the advisory board alongside Jens Nielsen, chief executive of the Novo Nordisk Foundation's BioInnovation Institute, and Fabian Theis, a computational biologist who directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich. Langer will also join the company's board of directors as an observer.
The appointments signal Cellular Intelligence's ambition to combine genomics, developmental biology and artificial intelligence into a single drug-discovery platform. The company is attempting to build a model that can predict and eventually control how cells behave, in the same way that existing AI systems predict text or images, with the aim of making medicines faster and cheaper to develop.
For decades, cell therapies that use living cells rather than chemical compounds have depended on slow and expensive trial-and-error laboratory work. Cellular Intelligence wants to feed a model enough data on how cells respond to different signals so that it can predict how to make a cell behave in a desired way, without testing every possibility by hand.
Micha Breakstone, the company's chief executive, described the additions as a deliberate fit with its founding premise, which he characterised as a marriage of three disciplines. He said the system the company is modelling is a living cell, which receives signals, processes information and changes its behaviour in response.
Putting LeCun, an AI researcher with no biology background, on the same board as Langer, a medical researcher with no AI background, is the company's way of demonstrating expertise on both sides. LeCun won the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for foundational work on deep learning and led Meta's Fundamental AI Research lab as chief AI scientist from 2013 to 2025. He left the company last December to launch AMI Labs, a venture built around «world models», where he is executive chairman.
Langer holds more than 1,500 issued and pending patents and has co-founded roughly 40 companies. He received the National Medal of Science and is an MIT Institute Professor, the university's highest faculty rank. He said his involvement with Cellular Intelligence sits alongside other biotech ventures he has backed this year, including Vivtex's $2.1 billion deal with Novo Nordisk, his son Michael Langer's venture firm T.Rx Capital, and his daughter Susan Langer's RNA startup Soufflé Therapeutics.
Nielsen runs the BioInnovation Institute, the Novo Nordisk Foundation's Copenhagen-based engine for founding and scaling life-science companies. Theis co-founded the Human Cell Atlas, an international project to map every cell type in the human body, and won Germany's 2023 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for machine-learning methods.
The advisory appointments follow Cellular Intelligence's acquisition in May of global rights to STEM-PD, an experimental Parkinson's disease cell therapy that Novo Nordisk shelved when it closed its cell-therapy division last October. The therapy is designed to replace dopamine-producing neurons lost to Parkinson's disease. It carries FDA Fast Track designation and is Phase 2-ready.
Novo Nordisk took an equity stake in Cellular Intelligence as part of the deal and remains eligible for future milestones and royalties. Breakstone said Novo Nordisk selected the company to advance STEM-PD and described the equity investment as a strong vote of confidence. STEM-PD remains Cellular Intelligence's only owned clinical programme, though Breakstone said the company plans to license its models to pharmaceutical partners for paid drug-discovery work and to develop additional medicines itself or with partners over time.
Langer said early internal benchmarks show stronger prediction results than existing models in both healthy development and cancer, despite the system never having trained on a single cancer cell. He said what matters to him is whether the science can lead to something that makes a difference for patients, and whether the people involved can carry it through.
Breakstone also credited Fidji Simo, OpenAI's chief executive of applications, with helping shape the company's direction while serving as a strategic adviser and consultant. Simo joined OpenAI last year after leading Instacart, adding another AI-world name to the company's roster of outside voices.
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