The company took a step toward that goal Monday, announcing that Moderna co-founder Robert “Bob” Langer and Turing Award-winning AI researcher Yann LeCun have joined its scientific advisory board, along with Jens Nielsen, chief executive of the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s BioInnovation Institute, and Fabian Theis, a computational biologist who directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich. Langer is also joining the company’s board of directors as an observer.

For decades, developing new medicines, especially cell therapies that use living cells rather than chemical compounds, has depended on slow, expensive trial-and-error lab work. The Boston-based Cellular Intelligence (CI) is trying to apply the same kind of pattern-recognition that powers modern AI systems to biology: feed a model enough data on how cells respond to different signals, and it may be able to predict how to make a cell do what you want, without testing every possibility by hand first. Putting LeCun, an AI researcher with no biology background, on the same board as Langer, a medical researcher with no AI background, is the company’s way of showing it has real expertise on both sides.

“What matters to me is whether the science can lead to something that makes a difference for patients, and whether the people involved can carry it through,” Langer told Fortune. “I have been doing this for over 50 years, and [CI’s CEO] Micha and the scientific team he has brought together are among the very best I have seen.”

Micha Breakstone, the CEO of CI, said the addition of the four new members precisely cater to the company’s foundation as “a marriage of three disciplines: genomics, developmental biology and AI.”

“A world model learns how a system behaves and predicts what happens when you act on it,” he told Fortune. “For us, the system is a living cell: the basic computational unit of life, receiving signals, processing information and changing its behavior in response.”

Combining AI with medicine

The board brings a special mix of medical and technology expertise. LeCun won the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his foundational work on deep learning and led Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab as the company’s chief AI scientist from 2013 to 2025. He left the company last December to launch AMI Labs, a company built around “world models”—AI systems designed to learn how a physical system behaves and predict what happens when it’s acted on—where he now serves as executive chairman.

Langer is an MIT Institute Professor, the school’s highest faculty rank, and holds more than 1,500 issued and pending patents. Beyond Moderna, he has co-founded roughly 40 companies and received the National Medal of Science. Jens Nielsen is chief executive of the BioInnovation Institute, the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Copenhagen-based engine for founding and scaling life-science companies. Fabian Theis directs the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich, co-founded the Human Cell Atlas, an international project to map every cell type in the human body, and won Germany’s 2023 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for machine-learning methods.

The company is bringing “a proprietary engine for generating biological data over time, an AI foundation model built to learn from that data, and an owned clinical program where it can test the practical value of its predictions,” Langer said. Early internal benchmarks show stronger prediction results than existing models in both healthy development and cancer, “despite never training on a single cancer cell,” he added.

Breakstone also credited OpenAI’s chief executive of applications, Fidji Simo, with helping shape the company’s direction while serving as a strategic advisor and consultant. “Her guidance has helped me sharpen our strategy and think through how we build a company of lasting significance,” he said. Simo joined OpenAI in the newly created role last year after leading Instacart, and her advisory ties to Cellular Intelligence add another AI-world name to the company’s roster of outside voices.

AI solving for Parkinson’s

The advisory additions follow the company’s acquisition in May of global rights to STEM-PD, an experimental Parkinson’s disease cell therapy that Novo Nordisk shelved when it shut down its cell-therapy division last October. The therapy, designed to replace dopamine-producing neurons lost to Parkinson’s, carries FDA Fast Track designation and is Phase 2-ready. Novo Nordisk took an equity stake in Cellular Intelligence as part of the deal and remains eligible for future milestones and royalties.

“Novo Nordisk selected CI to advance STEM-PD, and we acquired global rights to a Phase 2-ready Parkinson’s program with FDA IND clearance and Fast Track designation. Novo also made a strategic equity investment in CI. We see that as a strong vote of confidence in the next chapter of this work,” Breakstone said.

STEM-PD remains the company’s only owned clinical program, but Breakstone said Cellular Intelligence plans to license its models to pharmaceutical partners for paid drug-discovery work and to develop additional medicines itself or with partners over time.

Langer said his involvement with Cellular Intelligence sits alongside a number of other biotech ventures he’s backed this year, including Vivtex’s $2.1 billion deal with Novo Nordisk, his son Michael Langer’s venture firm T.Rx Capital, and his daughter Susan Langer’s RNA startup Soufflé Therapeutics.

Cellular Intelligence, founded in 2023 and formerly known as Somite.ai, has raised more than $70 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Novo Nordisk. STEM-PD remains an investigational therapy.