Cellular Intelligence, an AI-native TechBio, Enters Agreement with Novo Nordisk to Advance Clinical-Stage Parkinson's Cell Therapy
- 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, May 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- 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.
Contact: [email protected]
About Novo Nordisk
Novo Nordisk is a leading global healthcare company, founded in 1923 and headquartered in Denmark. Our purpose is to drive change to defeat serious chronic diseases, built upon our heritage in diabetes. We do so by pioneering scientific breakthroughs, expanding access to our medicines and working to prevent and ultimately cure disease.
SOURCE Cellular Intelligence
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