Boston – September 21, 2026 -- Cellular Intelligence, a Boston-based AI company building a universal foundation model of cell signaling, has appointed Turing Award laureate Yann LeCun, Moderna co-founder Robert "Bob" Langer, BioInnovation Institute CEO Jens Nielsen and Helmholtz Munich computational health director Fabian Theis to its Scientific Advisory Board. Langer also joins the company's Board of Directors as an observer.
Four scientific heavyweights bring a combined Turing Award, 1,500 patents and Germany's top research honor
LeCun won the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award and led Meta's Fundamental AI Research lab as Chief AI Scientist from 2013 to 2025; he is now Executive Chairman of world-model company AMI Labs and a Silver Professor at New York University. Langer, an MIT Institute Professor and the most cited engineer in history, holds more than 1,500 issued and pending patents and co-founded Moderna along with roughly 40 other companies. Nielsen leads the Novo Nordisk Foundation's BioInnovation Institute, a DKK 3 billion-plus life-science venture engine in Copenhagen, and has authored more than 900 scientific publications. Theis directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich and co-founded the Human Cell Atlas, receiving Germany's 2023 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.
Advisors will guide efforts to model how cells change and translate that into therapies
CEO Micha Breakstone said the advisors' role is to help connect predictive models of cellular behavior to experiments and therapeutic development. LeCun said the appeal lies in combining large-scale cellular data collection with phenomenological and causal models of cellular dynamics, calling the potential to learn principles that transfer across biological contexts "especially compelling." Langer said better prediction of cellular response to interventions could sharpen experimental design and open new avenues for patients.
Board moves follow a Novo Nordisk cell-therapy acquisition and a new science chief
The advisory appointments follow the arrival of Arjun Raj as Chief Scientific Officer and scientific co-founder, and the company's May 2026 acquisition of STEM-PD, an investigational Parkinson's disease cell therapy carrying FDA Fast Track designation, from Novo Nordisk. Manufacturing and clinical data from that program now feed into Cellular Intelligence's models. STEM-PD's safety and efficacy have not been established. The company's investors include Khosla Ventures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Novo Nordisk.