Cellular Intelligence, an AI-native TechBio, Enters Agreement with Novo Nordisk to Advance Clinical-Stage Parkinson’s Cell Therapy | Cellular Intelligence
May 11, 2026
CEO Perspective: A defining moment for Cellular Intelligence
Today we’re sharing a defining moment for Cellular Intelligence. We have entered into an agreement with Novo Nordisk to acquire STEM-PD, a Phase 2-ready allogeneic cell therapy program for Parkinson’s disease. In connection with the transaction, Novo Nordisk is also making a strategic investment in Cellular Intelligence.
The program has an FDA-cleared IND for Phase 2 and Fast Track Designation, following completion of Phase 1/2 dosing in the underlying academic clinical program, STEM-PD. The related academic trial was also highlighted by Nature Medicine in 2024 as one of the 11 clinical trials shaping medicine.
This is more than an asset acquisition.
This deal catapults CI into a Phase 2-ready clinical company and, just as importantly, gives us the clearest possible demonstration engine for our AI-native platform.
It marks the beginning of an AI-native era for cell replacement therapy, one where biology is no longer destiny, but design.
Cell therapy has long held extraordinary promise, but it has also been constrained by complexity. Manufacturing is hard. Biology is context-dependent. Protocol development remains too empirical, too slow, and too dependent on trial and error.
At Cellular Intelligence, we believe this can change.
We are building an AI-native, fully integrated therapeutics company. The same platform that learns how cells respond to signals can help design better protocols, improve manufacturability, optimize functional dose, and deepen our understanding of how development decisions connect to clinical outcomes.
STEM-PD gives us the ideal proving ground for that vision.
It brings together a clinical-stage program in Parkinson’s disease, an area of significant unmet need, with a platform designed to make cell therapy more predictive, scalable, and controllable.
Our central thesis is simple: cell therapy can move from an empirical process into a predictive engineering discipline.
This is the company we set out to build: the defining AI-native, fully integrated cell therapy company.
We are grateful to Novo Nordisk for their trust and confidence, to our investors and advisors for their continued belief, and to the Cellular Intelligence team for the relentless work that made this possible.
This is an extraordinary step forward for the company, for our platform, and most importantly, for the future of cell therapy and the patients it has the potential to one day serve.
Micha Breakstone, Co-Founder & CEO
STEM-PD is an investigational therapy; its safety and efficacy have not been established.
Cellular Intelligence, an AI-native TechBio, Enters Agreement with Novo Nordisk to Advance Clinical-Stage Parkinson’s Cell Therapy
May 11, 2026
- Cellular Intelligence has secured global rights to Novo Nordisk’s Parkinson’s program, a clinical-stage allogeneic cell therapy for Parkinson's disease with FDA Fast Track Designation.
- Cellular Intelligence will apply its AI foundation model to optimize and scale the program, compressing traditional cell therapy process development and manufacturing timelines, with the goal of removing barriers and reducing costs on the path to commercialization.
- Novo Nordisk becomes an equity investor in Cellular Intelligence and is eligible to receive future milestones and royalties.
Boston, Massachusetts – May 11, 2026 – Cellular Intelligence today announced that it has acquired global rights to Novo Nordisk’s clinical-stage cell therapy program for Parkinson’s disease. Cellular Intelligence intends to apply its proprietary AI platform to accelerate clinical development, manufacturing and the path to commercialization. Novo Nordisk will make an equity investment in the company, while remaining eligible for future milestones and royalties.
Through this agreement, Cellular Intelligence aims to advance the continued clinical development of the cell therapy Parkinson’s program and deliver a meaningful, disease-modifying therapy for people living with Parkinson's disease, a fast-growing neurodegenerative disease globally.
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 is appointing Nuno Mendonça, M.D., as Chief Medical Officer to lead the clinical advancement of the program. Dr. Mendonça is a board-certified neurologist who has held senior clinical development roles at Bial, AbbVie and Novartis Gene Therapies, spanning early- and late-stage programs in neuroscience and rare diseases across North America and Europe.
“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,” said Micha Breakstone, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO of Cellular Intelligence. “Optimizing and scaling complex cell therapy programs to reach patients globally is exactly the challenge our AI-native platform was built to solve.”
Cellular Intelligence will apply its AI-native platform to accelerate the program. The platform combines proprietary multiplexing technologies with a foundation model trained on massive-scale data spanning millions of unique perturbation conditions. This is intended to accelerate development timelines, reduce costs and improve the path to scalable manufacturing for a product with global reach. Beyond this program, the clinical and manufacturing data generated will further train Cellular Intelligence's foundation model, with applications that have the potential to extend across cell therapy and broader regenerative medicine.
"Finding the right steward for the program was critical, and we are convinced that Cellular Intelligence has the capabilities needed to advance it further,” said Jacob Petersen, Senior Vice President, Global Research, at Novo Nordisk. “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."
To learn more about Cellular Intelligence and the cell therapy Parkinson’s program, visit www.CellularIntelligence.com.
About Cellular Intelligence
Cellular Intelligence, operating under the formal legal entity Somite Therapeutics, is an AI-native TechBio and clinical-stage company building a universal foundation model of cell signaling to understand, predict, and ultimately control cellular behavior, transforming biology from trial-and-error into an engineering discipline. We take a full-stack approach, generating perturbation data at over 1,000x the efficiency of conventional methods, capturing millions of time-resolved treatment combinations per experiment, and training large-scale models that generalize across contexts to enable rational protocol design for regenerative medicine, context-specific drug effect prediction, and systematic disease modeling. Our founding team includes repeat AI entrepreneur Dr. Micha Breakstone (Chorus.ai, acquired for $575M), the Head of the Fundamental AI Group at MIT, and four professors from Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington, including the Chair of Genetics at Harvard, collectively holding five National Academy memberships. Based in Boston, Cellular Intelligence has raised over $60M to date from Khosla Ventures, CZI, SciFi VC, and AMD Ventures, and is rapidly scaling its world-class team.