Per FierceBiotech and DrugDiscoveryTrends, Cellular Intelligence - a Boston-based AI-native biotech formerly known as Somite Therapeutics (founded 2023) and backed by over $60 million from Khosla Ventures, CZI, AMD Ventures, and SciFi VC - has acquired global rights to STEM-PD, a Phase 2-ready allogeneic dopaminergic cell therapy for Parkinson's disease from Novo Nordisk. Per FierceBiotech, Novo shuttered its cell therapy unit in October 2025, laying off nearly 250 staff; under the deal Novo takes an equity stake in Cellular Intelligence with no upfront payment and retains milestone and royalty rights. Per company materials, STEM-PD holds FDA Fast Track designation and completed a first-in-human Phase I/II trial at sites in Sweden and Cambridge; CMO Nuno Mendonca told FierceBiotech the company aims to start Phase 2 by end of 2026. CEO Micha Breakstone told DrugDiscoveryTrends the startup's AI platform uses temporally resolved cell-signaling data to optimize manufacturing protocols, projecting gains such as a roughly 9% reduction in cell therapy cost of goods from protocol tuning alone.
What happened
Per FierceBiotech and the May 11 press release, Cellular Intelligence has acquired global rights to STEM-PD, an allogeneic pluripotent stem cell-derived dopaminergic progenitor therapy for Parkinson's disease, from Novo Nordisk. Novo shut down its cell therapy unit in October 2025, laying off nearly 250 employees, as part of a broader restructuring under new CEO Mike Doustdar. As part of the STEM-PD deal, Novo took an equity stake in Cellular Intelligence and retained milestone and royalty rights; no upfront payment was disclosed, per FierceBiotech. Jacob Petersen, Novo's senior vice president of global research, said in the press release: "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."
About Cellular Intelligence
Per DrugDiscoveryTrends and company materials, Cellular Intelligence was founded in October 2023 and is headquartered in Boston. It was previously called Somite Therapeutics / Somite AI before rebranding in January 2026. The company has raised over $60 million from Khosla Ventures (led a $47M Series A in May 2025), the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, AMD Ventures, and SciFi VC. CEO Micha Breakstone, Ph.D., previously co-founded and sold Chorus.ai for $575 million. CTO Jonathan Rosenfeld, Ph.D., previously led the Fundamental AI Group at MIT. Per FierceBiotech, Cellular Intelligence has six preclinical assets in addition to STEM-PD and is expanding into Copenhagen with a 26-person team that includes former Novo staff who worked on the program.
Clinical background
Per FierceBiotech and the Lund Stem Cell Center, STEM-PD originated from over a decade of research at Lund University under neuroscientist Malin Parmar, Ph.D., and entered a first-in-human Phase I/II trial in February 2023, enrolling eight participants at sites including Skane University Hospital and Cambridge University Hospitals. The trial demonstrated cell engraftment and promising safety and tolerability; Nature Medicine named it one of 11 trials expected to shape medicine in 2024. STEM-PD carries FDA Fast Track designation. Per FierceBiotech, CMO Nuno Mendonca, M.D. - who previously led late-stage EMEA development of the gene therapy Zolgensma at Novartis - told FierceBiotech that a Phase 2 start is targeted by end of 2026.
The AI platform
Per DrugDiscoveryTrends, Cellular Intelligence's foundation model, Universal Virtual Cell-Signaling Model, tracks how cells change in response to external signals over time. Breakstone told DrugDiscoveryTrends: "Unlike any other company, we're able to track cells over time. Our data is temporally resolved. It has context." He compared the temporal-input approach to the scaling laws behind large language models. The company claims this lets it predict the effect of small protocol tweaks - for example, a six-hour vs. ten-hour exposure window to a growth factor - on properties such as cell purity, viability, and engraftment. Breakstone said a 10% improvement in the viability window yields roughly a 9% reduction in cost of goods, plus easier surgical administration. "Cell replacement therapies have been plagued by scalability, producibility, costs, etc.," Breakstone told DrugDiscoveryTrends. "Those are exactly the areas that we believe we can improve on."
What to watch
- •Phase 2 trial initiation: Cellular Intelligence targets a STEM-PD Phase 2 start by end of 2026, per FierceBiotech.
- •Platform validation: publication of training datasets, protocol-optimization results, or manufacturing metadata from the Universal Virtual Cell-Signaling Model.
- •Competitive context: Aspen Neuroscience is advancing an autologous Parkinson's cell therapy toward Phase 3, a contrast to STEM-PD's allogeneic approach (per FierceBiotech).
- •Novo Nordisk pipeline: per Novo communications, all former cell therapy clinical and late-preclinical assets have now been transferred; no further cell therapy program deals are expected.
Scoring Rationale #
This deal sits at the intersection of AI foundation models and clinical-stage regenerative medicine, relevant to practitioners tracking ML applications in drug development and bioprocess optimization. The CZI- and Khosla-backed startup brings a novel temporal cell-signaling model to a Phase 2-ready asset from a major pharma exit, making it a substantive and well-sourced story. Score reflects notable domain-specific importance to AI/DS practitioners; not a frontier AI event but a credible real-world application of foundation model thinking to a pressing cell-manufacturing bottleneck.
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