Many diseases are caused or made more severe by the destruction of healthy cells in the body, making it harder or even impossible for it to perform certain functions. Parkinson’s disease, for example, occurs when neurons that produce dopamine start to break down and die, and Type 1 diabetes is caused by an autoimmune reaction that destroys the cells that produce insulin.
Since the 2010s, researchers have explored the possibility of treating these diseases with induced pluripotent stem cells (or iPSCs). These cells are made by reprogramming blood or skin cells until they start behaving like stem cells in embryos, meaning they can then be programmed to turn into basically any type of cell.
Although iPSC’s show promise in treating degenerative diseases, there is one major catch: right now, creating these cells into useful tissues is a laborious process that can cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars per patient. This makes both research and the development of potential cures an expensive prospect.
But Cellino, a biotech startup founded in 2017, is developing self-contained units called cassettes that can grow personalized cell treatments for patients on site at their hospital. (Alex Morgan, a partner at Khosla Ventures who has invested in Cellino, likens each unit to a “Nespresso pod.) The potential for the technology, called Nebula, is huge: cofounder and CEO Nabiha Saklayen told Forbes that it could reduce manufacturing costs for iPSCs by at least 10 times.
Now, the federal government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has given Cellino a $25 million grant, adding to its $96 million in venture capital funding from firms such as Leaps by Bayer, the Engine Ventures and Khosla Ventures.
Cellino plans to use the money to take what it’s doing now in automated cell growth with off-the-shelf parts and developing its own, more compact version, which could ideally be used in hospitals around the country to make treatments on demand.
“We have all the fundamental building blocks,” Saklayen said. “And now we’re putting it together in an ultra-scalable version. Our long-term vision is to be able to deploy this type of manufacturing technology in a distributed manner so personalized iPSCs will be available to patients everywhere.”
A physicist by training, Saklayen, 35, cofounded Cellino in 2017 with Matthias Wagner (now chief technology officer), Marinna Madrid (now chief product officer) and Stan Wang, who has since left the company. Over the past few years, the company has developed an automated system for growing iPSCs, relying on computer vision to monitor the growth of cells, and lasers to destroy unhealthy cells or keep them from growing too closely together.
Susan Hockfield, former president and current professor of neuroscience at MIT who is familiar with Cellino’s technology, calls its approach an “incredibly insightful, clever way to use the technology of today against these complicated biological processes.”
“The thing that to my mind differentiates Cellino from the others is not just producing cells but industrializing the production of cells,” she explained. “It’s not being done by someone chained to the lab bench pipetting until their thumb has a blister on it.”
Morgan, who invested in Cellino’s seed and series A rounds, said one advantage Cellino has in developing its technology is its multidisciplinary team, which makes it hard to compete with. “There’s no one else doing this,” he emphasized.
