The year was 2021. Tech entrepreneur Micha Breakstone, PhD, had just sold the conversation intelligence platform, Chorus.ai, to ZoomInfo for $575 million and was eager for a new challenge. As an expert in natural language processing and automatic speech recognition, Breakstone recalled watching the fields commoditize and was not interested in another “incremental technical win.” “I was brought up with the calling of Tikkun Olam,” said Breakstone in an interview with GEN Edge, as he described the Hebrew phrase, “repairing the world.” “Biology felt like the one place where I could truly live that calling,” he continued. Breakstone was prompted to reconnect with a long-time friend of 27 years, Allon Klein, PhD, an esteemed stem-cell biologist and now professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Breakstone “knew nothing about biology at the time,” but was intent on learning the science and culture of biotech, even as Klein remained skeptical and hesitant to mix business with a friendship that began at age 19. Klein warmed up to the idea of partnering on a new enterprise after Breakstone “came back twice more,” and facilitated introductions to Harvard developmental biology colleagues and National Academy of Science members, Olivier Pourquié, PhD, and Cliff Tabin, PhD. What slowly came together was a mission to pursue what some see as a holy grail of regenerative medicine: the ability to generate any human cell type to replace diseased or damaged tissue. The early Cellular Intelligence team (from left to right): Allon Klein, PhD, Micha Breakstone, PhD, and Olivier Pourquié, PhD [Cellular Intelligence] More than somites Remarkably, only 20 fundamental molecular signaling pathways give rise to thousands of cell states, resulting in an unfathomably large search…
