LeCun and Langer join Cellular Intelligence, pairing AI with cell therapy

Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning AI researcher who led Meta's Fundamental AI Research lab, and Robert Langer, the MIT professor and Moderna co-founder, have joined the scientific advisory board of Cellular Intelligence, a Boston-based startup applying AI to cell biology. Langer is also joining the company's board of directors as an observer, the company announced Monday.

The pairing is deliberate: LeCun brings deep learning expertise, Langer brings decades of biotech experience, and together they signal Cellular Intelligence's ambition to build AI models that can predict and control how living cells behave. The company's first test case is STEM-PD, an experimental Parkinson's cell therapy it acquired from Novo Nordisk in May, which is Phase 2-ready and carries FDA Fast Track designation.

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 is trying to apply the same pattern-recognition that powers modern AI systems to biology: feed a model enough data on how cells respond to different signals, and it may be able to predict how to make a cell do what you want, without testing every possibility by hand first.

The new board members bring a special mix of expertise. LeCun won the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his foundational work on deep learning and led Meta's Fundamental AI Research lab as the company's chief AI scientist from 2013 to 2025. He left the company last December to launch AMI Labs, a company built around 'world models' - AI systems designed to learn how a physical system behaves and predict what happens when it's acted on - where he now serves as executive chairman. Langer is an MIT Institute Professor, the school's highest faculty rank, and holds more than 1,500 issued and pending patents. Beyond Moderna, he has co-founded roughly 40 companies and received the National Medal of Science.

The advisory board also includes Jens Nielsen, chief executive of the BioInnovation Institute, the Novo Nordisk Foundation's Copenhagen-based engine for founding and scaling life-science companies, and Fabian Theis, a computational biologist who directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich, co-founded the Human Cell Atlas, and won Germany's 2023 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for machine-learning methods. OpenAI's chief executive of applications, Fidji Simo, is serving as a strategic advisor and consultant, helping shape the company's direction, according to CEO Micha Breakstone.

The company is bringing 'a proprietary engine for generating biological data over time, an AI foundation model built to learn from that data, and an owned clinical program where it can test the practical value of its predictions,' Langer said. Early internal benchmarks show stronger prediction results than existing models in both healthy development and cancer, 'despite never training on a single cancer cell,' he added. 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.

The advisory additions follow the company's acquisition in May of global rights to STEM-PD, an experimental Parkinson's disease cell therapy that Novo Nordisk shelved when it shut down its cell-therapy division last October. The therapy, designed to replace dopamine-producing neurons lost to Parkinson's, 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. 'Novo Nordisk selected CI to advance STEM-PD, and we acquired global rights to a Phase 2-ready Parkinson's program with FDA IND clearance and Fast Track designation. Novo also made a strategic equity investment in CI. We see that as a strong vote of confidence in the next chapter of this work,' Breakstone said.