The Pulse
Cellular Intelligence Adds LeCun and Langer to Scientific Board
Cellular Intelligence has appointed Yann LeCun, Bob Langer, Jens Nielsen and Fabian Theis to its Scientific Advisory Board. Langer will also serve as an observer on the company’s Board of Directors as the Boston startup develops AI models o
AI.info Team ·
Cellular Intelligence on September 21 announced that Yann LeCun, Robert “Bob” Langer, Jens Nielsen and Fabian Theis have joined its Scientific Advisory Board, giving the Boston company senior figures from artificial intelligence, drug delivery, systems biology and computational health.
Langer will also join Cellular Intelligence’s Board of Directors as an observer. The appointments come as the company develops what it calls a universal foundation model of cell signaling, with the stated goal of predicting how cells change and translating those predictions into therapeutic development.
Four advisers, one biological problem
Cellular Intelligence says the four advisers bring expertise tied to two challenges: learning predictive models from complex systems and applying that understanding to medicine. The company’s announcement describes the board as a bridge between large-scale cellular data collection, mathematical and causal modeling, experimental biology and drug development.
LeCun received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for foundational work in deep learning. He founded Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab and served as the company’s chief AI scientist from 2013 to 2025. He is now executive chairman of AMI Labs, which he co-founded, and a Silver Professor at New York University, according to the announcement.
“The models that interest me learn how the world works from data and predict what happens when we act on it. Living cells present an extraordinarily rich version of that challenge.”
Yann LeCun, Scientific Advisory Board member
His role gives Cellular Intelligence a prominent advocate for AI systems that model the world beyond language and image prediction. The company is applying that idea to cellular behavior, where interventions can produce different results across cell types, disease states and biological contexts.
Why Bob Langer is joining the board
Langer is an Institute Professor at MIT and a co-founder of Moderna. The company says he holds more than 1,500 issued and pending patents and has received the National Medal of Science, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
His advisory role links Cellular Intelligence’s modeling program to the practical work of developing medicines. The company says its models are intended to help researchers predict how cells respond to an intervention, design more precise experiments and identify therapeutic opportunities.
“If we can better predict how cells respond to an intervention, we can ask more precise questions, design better experiments and open new possibilities for patients.”
Robert “Bob” Langer, Scientific Advisory Board member and Board Observer
Langer’s appointment as a board observer is separate from his position on the Scientific Advisory Board. The announcement does not disclose financial terms or describe the observer role’s voting rights.
Nielsen and Theis add systems biology expertise
Jens Nielsen joins the board while serving as chief executive officer of the BioInnovation Institute, the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s life-science company-building organization in Copenhagen. He is also a professor of systems biology at Chalmers University of Technology and has authored more than 900 scientific publications, according to Cellular Intelligence.
Fabian Theis directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich, serves as scientific director of Helmholtz AI and is a professor of mathematical modeling of biological systems at the Technical University of Munich. Theis co-founded the Human Cell Atlas and received the 2023 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for machine-learning methods related to cell development and drug response.
The appointments give the company advisers whose work covers both the construction of biological models and the design of experiments that can test those models. Theis described the pairing of data and prediction as a way to measure how well models generalize across biological contexts and learn from their failures.
Cellular Intelligence ties the board to STEM-PD
The advisory appointments follow Arjun Raj’s arrival as chief scientific officer and scientific co-founder. They also follow Cellular Intelligence’s acquisition of STEM-PD from Novo Nordisk in May 2026. The company describes STEM-PD as an investigational Parkinson’s disease cell therapy with FDA Fast Track designation.
Cellular Intelligence says manufacturing and clinical data from the program will feed back into its models. The release does not present new trial results, clinical outcomes or evidence that STEM-PD’s safety and efficacy have been established. The company explicitly states that STEM-PD remains investigational.
That distinction matters to the company’s pitch: Cellular Intelligence is presenting therapeutic development as part of the model-building process, rather than describing AI as a separate software layer added after laboratory work. Its announcement frames the new advisers as participants in that connection between prediction, experimentation and cell therapy.
A board built around prediction, not a product launch
The appointments do not represent a new drug approval, a clinical readout or a disclosed financing round. They mark a scientific and governance expansion for a company trying to make cell signaling legible to machine-learning systems.
Cellular Intelligence has not disclosed a public benchmark showing that its models outperform established biological methods. For now, the concrete changes are the four advisory appointments, Langer’s observer seat, Raj’s recent appointment and the company’s ownership of the STEM-PD program.