Cellular Intelligence has announced an agreement to acquire global rights to Novo Nordisk’s clinical-stage cell therapy program for Parkinson’s disease, with the intention of applying its proprietary AI platform to accelerate clinical development, manufacturing, and the path to commercialization. As part of the agreement, Novo Nordisk will make an equity investment in Cellular Intelligence and remain eligible for future milestones and royalties.
The program covers an allogeneic pluripotent stem cell-derived dopaminergic progenitor therapy currently in a first-in-human Phase 1/2 clinical trial. It has received FDA Fast Track Designation as well as IND clearance for further clinical development. Cellular Intelligence said it will apply its AI-native platform — which combines proprietary multiplexing technologies with a foundation model trained on data spanning millions of unique perturbation conditions — to compress traditional cell therapy process development and manufacturing timelines, reduce costs, and improve the path to scalable global production.
To lead clinical advancement of the program, Cellular Intelligence is appointing Nuno Mendonça, M.D., as Chief Medical Officer. Mendonça is a board-certified neurologist with senior clinical development experience at Bial, AbbVie, and Novartis Gene Therapies, spanning early- and late-stage programs in neuroscience and rare diseases across North America and Europe. The Boston-based company said clinical and manufacturing data generated through the program will further train its foundation model, with applications that could extend across cell therapy and broader regenerative medicine.
Cellular Intelligence, operating under the formal legal entity Somite Therapeutics, has raised over $60 million to date from investors including Khosla Ventures, CZI, SciFi VC, and AMD Ventures. Its founding team includes repeat AI entrepreneur Dr. Micha Breakstone, the Head of the Fundamental AI Group at MIT, and four professors from Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington.
KEY QUOTES:
“This cell therapy Parkinson’s program is truly innovative and exemplifies the powerful convergence of exciting academic discovery with the uncompromising quality of a global pharmaceutical leader, and we are honored to carry the program into its next chapter. Optimizing and scaling complex cell therapy programs to reach patients globally is exactly the challenge our AI-native platform was built to solve.”
Micha Breakstone, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO, Cellular Intelligence
“Finding the right steward for the program was critical, and we are convinced that Cellular Intelligence has the capabilities needed to advance it further. The convergence of developmental biology and genomics, and the possibility of combining this with AI on a single platform, provide an exciting opportunity in medicine in general, and for the cell therapy field in particular.”
Jacob Petersen, Senior Vice President, Global Research, Novo Nordisk
