Cellular Intelligence adds Yann LeCun, Bob Langer to board

Cellular Intelligence, founded in 2023 and formerly known as Somite.ai, has raised more than $70 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Novo Nordisk. The company's premise is that the pattern-recognition behind modern AI can be applied to biology: feed a model enough data on how cells respond to signals, and it may predict how to make a cell do what you want without testing every possibility by hand first.

The advisory additions follow the company's May acquisition of global rights to STEM-PD, the only owned clinical program it has. STEM-PD was shelved by Novo Nordisk when it shut down its cell-therapy division last October, and Novo Nordisk took an equity stake in Cellular Intelligence as part of the deal. Breakstone said Cellular Intelligence 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 told Fortune that early internal benchmarks show stronger prediction results than existing models in both healthy development and cancer, despite never training on a single cancer cell. Whether that claim holds up in an owned clinical program may determine how quickly Cellular Intelligence can turn its model into licensed drug-discovery work for partners, and how much of a vote of confidence the STEM-PD arrangement proves to be.