Cellino Bio

Personalized Biological Repair

Andrew Kuzemczak
August 06, 2025

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TL;DR

Cellino Bio is revolutionizing regenerative medicine by automating the production of patient-specific stem cell therapies using lasers, AI, and synthetic biology—making personalized treatments faster, cheaper, and scalable.
Their modular “Nebula” system enables hospitals to manufacture iPSC-based therapies on-site, offering safer, immune-compatible treatments for chronic diseases like Parkinson’s, macular degeneration, and heart failure.
If successful, Cellino’s platform could shift healthcare from symptom management to true biological repair—reducing the economic burden of chronic illness and making advanced regenerative therapies widely accessible.

Hi friend,

Welcome back to Future Human! Here in the Upper East Side, we’re deep in prep mode as we gear up to welcome our brand-new M1s! Orientation weekend (coined cAMP) is almost here, and we’ve got a packed schedule ready to help them feel at home—not just on campus, but across the city. From volleyball tournaments to scavenger hunts across campus, from group dinners at some of the best spots in the UES to late-night bonding events, it’s going to be a whirlwind of excitement. We can’t wait to kick things off and show the incoming class what makes this place so special.

That said, I’ve been (and will continue to be) knee-deep in logistics, sign-ups, backup plans, and very detailed Google Sheets.

Anyway—where were we? Right, back to the future.

So with that, let me ask you:

What would healthcare look like if every hospital could grow your replacement cells on-site—no donor, no waitlist, no immune rejection?

The Story

The future of regenerative medicine hinges on our ability to replace damaged or diseased cells with healthy, lab-grown alternatives. Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)—adult cells reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state—hold massive potential for personalized therapies. But while iPSCs can, in theory, treat a range of conditions like macular degeneration or Parkinson’s, producing them at clinical-grade quality is still prohibitively slow, labor-intensive, and expensive. Enter Cellino, a biotech company launched in 2017 to make personalized regenerative medicine scalable, affordable, and real. I have heard of the promise of iPSCs and regenerative medicine since well before college. Medicine takes time, so it is not shocking that we are still waiting for a clinically viable model. Physicians have a lot of endurance when it comes to waiting for the next best thing, but it must reach a significant standard to replace any current lines of therapy.

Cellino was founded by three physicists—Nabiha Saklayen, Matthias Wagner, and Marinna Madrid—who crossed paths while studying at Harvard. What united them wasn’t just a shared expertise in lasers and imaging, but a sense that biology was on the cusp of a transformation—and physics had something important to offer. Saklayen, who had arrived at Harvard from Emory, had become fascinated by the idea that light could be used not just to observe biology, but to precisely control it. Madrid, who had transferred from community college to UCLA before earning her PhD, was driven by the idea that breakthrough science should serve real people—and not remain trapped in academic labs. Wagner, a serial entrepreneur, brought the belief that the right technology platform could turn a promising concept into something the world could actually use. Together, they imagined a future where cell therapies wouldn’t be handcrafted in cleanrooms, but built autonomously and delivered directly to patients—quickly, affordably, and at scale.

What they’re building is an entirely new approach to iPSC manufacturing—one that merges machine learning, high-resolution imaging, and laser-based delivery into a fully automated platform. Cellino’s proprietary NanoLaze system can program cells with synthetic biology tools that toggle genes on or off in precise sequences, steering stem cells into specific mature cell types like neurons, kidney cells, or retinal pigment epithelial cells. The process is 10x faster than current methods and intentionally produces mixed cell populations for better tissue integration and engraftment.¹

The implications are massive. Currently, producing one patient’s worth of iPSCs can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But Cellino’s “cassette” system, which grows personalized therapies in self-contained, hospital-deployable units, could cut those costs by an order of magnitude. Khosla Ventures partner Alex Morgan likens it to a “Nespresso pod” for stem cell therapies. That promise has attracted over $120 million in funding to date, including a $25 million grant from the federal government’s ARPA-H program.⁴^,⁵

Backed by FDA’s Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation and now building its first foundry at Mass General Brigham’s Gene and Cell Therapy Institute, Cellino is pushing hard to industrialize the production of regenerative cell therapies. It’s also begun forging strategic alliances, including a partnership with Matricelf to develop spinal cord injury treatments, and with South Korea’s Karis Bio to launch iPSC-derived therapies for heart disease in Asia.⁶^,⁷

What started as a physics problem is now a deeply biological solution—aimed at making cell therapy not just technically possible, but clinically practical.

The Tech

Cellino is building the infrastructure to bring personalized regenerative medicine to life—literally. At the heart of the company’s vision is an autonomous biomanufacturing platform that turns a patient’s own cells into potent, one-time treatments for chronic degenerative conditions. By combining deep learning, precision optics, and synthetic biology, Cellino is compressing what was once a costly, manual, years-long cell therapy process into a reproducible, scalable workflow that can run on autopilot.

At the core of this platform is Nebula™, a modular, cassette-based system that can be deployed in centralized foundries or installed directly in hospitals. Each “cassette” functions like a miniaturized manufacturing site—producing personalized, biologically young cells from a patient’s own blood. These therapies are inherently self-compatible, eliminating the need for donor matching or long-term immunosuppression. And because Nebula is compact and self-contained, it dramatically expands access to advanced regenerative treatments, especially for patients far from academic medical centers.³

Here’s how Cellino’s patient-centered process works:

Doctor’s Visit & Diagnosis: The patient consults their physician and receives a diagnosis for a degenerative condition like Parkinson’s, macular degeneration, or heart failure.
Personalized Therapy Prescription: The doctor prescribes a regenerative cell therapy. A blood sample is sent to a nearby Cellino Regenerative Foundry.
Cell Regeneration & Production: The patient’s blood cells are reprogrammed into iPSCs and then transformed into the mature, functional cell type needed for their therapy—such as dopaminergic neurons, retinal cells, or cardiac muscle cells.
Therapy Transplantation: The patient returns to their healthcare provider to receive the transplant of their personalized cells, designed to restore lost function and reverse disease progression.

The engine behind this workflow is a proprietary optical bioprocessing system, where laser-generated microbubbles are used to precisely remove unwanted or unhealthy cells, ensuring optimal density and purity. Cellino’s closed-loop imaging system continuously monitors and guides cell differentiation, delivering consistent results over time. Unlike conventional methods that rely on highly skilled technicians, Cellino’s approach is driven by automation—with deep learning models that improve with each batch and a cloud-connected workcell that collects training data, cultures cells, and fine-tunes the process.

This digital twin environment—dubbed the Cellinoverse—simulates biomanufacturing behaviors in silico, creating a feedback loop between real-world biology and digital optimization. Human experts remain in the loop, but no longer need to be in the lab. The result: a platform that delivers therapies not only faster, but better.

As the company scales its Regenerative Foundry network, Cellino envisions a future where transformative cell therapies are manufactured on demand and delivered locally—just like a lab test. Only this time, the output isn’t data. It’s living medicine.

The Market

Cell therapy is no longer a futuristic concept—it’s a rapidly growing, high-stakes market projected to reach over $20 billion by 2030, with an annual growth rate of 22.66%. Stem cell therapy alone is expected to quadruple in value over the next five years, driven by the increasing burden of chronic diseases, an aging global population, and technological breakthroughs in regenerative medicine.⁸^,⁹

This booming demand has attracted an influx of players—from big pharma giants to nimble startups—all racing to bring transformative treatments to market. Bristol-Myers Squibb and Novartis, for instance, have already commercialized CAR-T therapies for cancer, with drugs like Breyanzi and Kymriah receiving regulatory approval in global markets. Meanwhile, emerging players like Aurion Biotech and Nkarta are expanding the field with cell therapies for corneal disease and autoimmune conditions like lupus nephritis.

In the regenerative medicine space specifically, companies like Lineage Cell Therapeutics, Century Therapeutics, and Athersys are pushing forward with novel approaches. Lineage has shown progress in clinical trials for macular degeneration using pluripotent stem cells, while Century is developing iPSC-derived immune cells to target cancers. Athersys, on the other hand, is advancing allogeneic therapies aimed at conditions like stroke and inflammatory disease using its MultiStem platform.¹⁰

What sets Cellino apart in this crowded field is not just its focus on induced pluripotent stem cells, but how it manufactures them. Most competitors rely on manual, centralized manufacturing processes—slow, expensive, and difficult to scale. Cellino is building a completely autonomous, modular system that automates iPSC production at both speed and scale. Rather than relying on massive biomanufacturing centers, its Nebula™ system compresses the process into hospital-friendly cassettes, enabling distributed, localized production of customized therapies.

Where others aim to produce off-the-shelf solutions or centralized stem cell lines, Cellino is focused on personalized, autologous treatments—cells derived from the patient themselves. This reduces immune rejection risks and eliminates the need for immunosuppression, a major advantage in safety and accessibility. Add to that the company’s FDA Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation, and Cellino has positioned itself as one of the few companies capable of industrializing next-generation regenerative therapies with a path to accelerated regulatory approval.

As cell therapy matures into a foundational pillar of modern medicine, the winners will be those who can make complex biology work at scale. Cellino’s technology-first approach, combined with its focus on automation and personalization, puts it in a unique position to lead the next era of regenerative care.

The Sick

For millions of people suffering from chronic, degenerative conditions, the promise of cell therapy has long felt just out of reach—technologically fascinating, but clinically distant. CellinoBio is changing that. By turning a patient’s own blood cells into personalized, regenerative treatments using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), Cellino’s technology could shift the standard of care across a wide range of diseases where current options fall short.

Unlike donor-derived or embryonic stem cells, iPSCs are reprogrammed from a patient’s own somatic cells, allowing them to self-renew and differentiate into virtually any cell type—neurons, retinal cells, cardiac muscle, liver cells, and more. Because they’re sourced from the patient, iPSC therapies bypass one of the biggest hurdles in transplantation: immune rejection. This eliminates the need for chronic immunosuppressants, which carry serious risks like infection, cancer, and metabolic complications, and are currently required in organ transplantation to prevent the immune system from attacking foreign cells.¹¹^,¹²

This matters because the burden of chronic disease is growing fast—and conventional treatments simply can’t keep up. In the U.S., chronic diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, and age-related blindness are now among the top causes of death and disability. Conditions like diabetes alone are responsible for over 100,000 deaths annually in the U.S. and affect more than 37 million Americans—many of whom suffer complications like nerve damage, kidney failure, or vision loss. Traditional treatments can manage symptoms, but none address the root cause: cell loss and tissue dysfunction.¹³^,¹⁴

Cellino’s approach—turning blood samples into clinically viable iPSC-derived tissues—creates the possibility of true biological repair. A patient with Parkinson’s could receive a transplant of healthy dopaminergic neurons. Someone losing vision from macular degeneration could be treated with new retinal cells. A heart attack survivor might one day regain cardiac function with lab-grown heart tissue. And because the therapies are derived from the patient’s own cells, they are inherently safer, more personalized, and more durable. I’m not going to hold my breath, because this takes time, but I will be watching closely.

Importantly, Cellino’s technology isn’t just about what it can make, but how it scales. By using laser-guided automation and AI to produce personalized therapies on-site or regionally, the company is paving the way for distributed regenerative care—where hospitals can manufacture cell therapies locally and deliver them quickly. For patients, that means greater access, lower costs, and faster recovery timelines.

In a healthcare system strained by aging populations and rising chronic disease, Cellino’s platform offers a fundamentally new path: one where medicine is made not from pills or infusions, but from your own living cells, engineered to help you heal.

The Economy

The promise of Cellino Bio’s platform extends far beyond the bench—it could fundamentally reshape the economic foundation of healthcare. Chronic diseases are among the most costly burdens on health systems globally, and Cellino’s high-throughput, automated approach to cell therapy production stands to drastically reduce the price and expand the reach of regenerative treatments.

Chronic illnesses like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer already cost the U.S. medical system over $1 trillion annually. Globally, the burden of chronic disease is projected to rise to $47 trillion by 2030. Traditional models of care focus heavily on disease management, but Cellino's platform enables a future where disease reversal—or even cure—becomes a practical outcome.

Take cardiovascular disease, one of our favorite topics here at Future Human, which costs the U.S. $407 billion annually as of 2019. Or diabetes, which incurs $237 billion in healthcare costs in the U.S. and $966 billion worldwide. These are precisely the types of conditions where iPSC-based regenerative medicine could make an enormous difference. By creating personalized, immune-compatible stem cells at scale, Cellino’s technology could support next-generation cell therapies that restore organ function or replace damaged tissue—thereby reducing or eliminating long-term disease costs.

Alzheimer’s disease, the most expensive neurodegenerative disorder, cost the U.S. over $345 billion in 2023, a figure projected to reach nearly $1 trillion by 2050. As Cellino's approach enables faster, more standardized production of neural stem cells derived from iPSCs, it opens new doors for personalized brain cell therapy and regenerative treatments for neurodegenerative disease—a domain that has historically seen little therapeutic progress and enormous financial loss.¹⁴

Another major financial benefit lies in reducing dependence on immunosuppressive drugs, which are necessary in traditional donor-based transplants and often lead to patient non-compliance. Noncompliance alone is associated with $7,000–$21,000 in increased medical costs per patient over just three years. By enabling autologous (patient-derived) stem cell therapies that do not provoke immune rejection, Cellino Bio's platform eliminates the need for lifelong immunosuppression and its downstream cost burden.¹⁵

In short, Cellino Bio’s innovation—if successful—could deliver immense value not just to individual patients, but to entire health systems. By accelerating the shift from disease management to regenerative cure, Cellino isn’t just advancing science—it’s rewriting the healthcare economy.

My Thoughts

There’s something kind of wild about the fact that lasers, AI, and a few brilliant physicists might completely change how we treat disease—and yet, here we are. The idea that a hospital could grow your own fresh heart cells or neurons on-site, like some kind of sci-fi bakery, blows my mind. But beyond the cool factor, this could mean real, scalable relief for millions living with chronic disease. Less suffering. Less spending. And maybe—just maybe—a future where the best medicine isn’t reserved for the lucky few, but becomes the standard for everyone.

To more lives saved,

Andrew

I always appreciate feedback, questions, and conversation. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn @andrewkuzemczak.