🧬A Bio-Inspired Physicist Leading A Pioneering Regenerative Medicine Company
FemWealth Issue #45
Happy Sunday, FemWealth Friends!
Can you imagine a future where our bodies can regenerate or where we can have access to medicine uniquely designed for each of our bodies?
Dr. Nabiha Saklayen, a bio-inspired physicist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Cellino Biotech, is working on making this vision a reality by harnessing advances in biology, machine learning, and lasers to create personalized stem cell banks.
“The only way to achieve meaningful progress towards scalable stem cell manufacturing is to interweave normally disparate fields towards a single mission. I’m proud to have built and attracted a diverse team at Cellino – a world-class, multi-disciplinary team of physicists, computational biologists, machine learning scientists, and engineers, and take them on this journey with me. When you look at the fabric of the company, everybody is unique and different.”
Born in Saudi Arabia to a Bangladeshi family, she grew up in Germany, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. The exposure to wide-ranging cultures, ideas, and experiences made her curious about both the humanities and sciences.
In high school, her passion for time travel, space, and parallel universes, determined her to pursue physics for her university studies.
Enrolled at Harvard University, she chose to study biophysics to be closer to real-world applications. She joined a laser physics and nanofabrication lab and started collaborating with biologists. Thus she learned about the need in biology to deliver cargoes into cells (e.g., gene-editing tools, DNA, or RNA) and the difficulty of keeping the cells healthy and alive in the process.
During her Ph.D. research, she invented laser-based delivery techniques that combine pulsed lasers and patterned nanosurfaces. She designed nanostructured add-ons to the laser system that deliver pulses of laser light to large numbers of cells at once, making it possible to dose them with gene editors at clinically useful speeds and lower cost.
“My Ph.D. challenged me in many ways, but I found starting a company to be significantly more challenging. The transition from academia to entrepreneurship showed me that the hours are longer, the stakes are higher, and the decisions are increasingly complex.”
Based on this innovation, she founded Cellino Biotech, together with Marinna Madrid (CPO) and Matthias Wagner (CTO), to commercialize her idea and use gene-editing tools to engineer cells. The Cellino laser platform can remove cells or deliver payloads into them by taking an image-driven approach to cell editing. The technology could enable scalable cell manufacturing for many different diseases and applications, including drug discovery, organoid, and organ-on-chip industry.
The company's mission is to democratize personalized regenerative medicine by making stem cells for every human in an automated, scalable way.
“Our vision is to build a Cellino foundry. I envision it will look much like a server room. But each shelf has a cassette of cells being manufactured in an autonomous manner.”
Cellino has recently raised an $80 Million Series A financing round led by Leaps by Bayer. The startup plans to expand access to stem cell-based therapies with a goal to build the first autonomous human cell foundry in 2025.
As CEO of Cellino, Dr. Saklayen sets the vision and pathway of the company and is responsible for R&D, fundraising, business strategies, and attracting top talent.
Dr. Saklayen received her Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University and has been recognized on the MIT Tech Review 35 Innovators Under 35 list and the Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list. She is also the inaugural Tory Burch Foundation Fellow in Genomics at the Innovative Genomics Institute led by Nobel Laureate Dr. Jennifer Doudna.
Learn more:
🎥 Could you recover from illness ... using your own stem cells?
🤓 Conversation with Cellino founder Nabiha Saklayen w/ Alex Morgan, Khosla Ventures
💸 This Stem Cell Manufacturing Startup Just Raised An $80 Million War Chest To Revolutionize Medicine
FemWealth Favorites ❤️
Leadership: 👩🏾💻 Why Timnit Gebru Isn’t Waiting for Big Tech to Fix AI's Problems
Justice: ⚖️🇵🇰 Pakistan’s first female Supreme Court judge sworn in - after decades of struggle to get representation for women in Pakistan's male-dominated society, Ayesha Malik, 55, now sits on a bench with 16 other male colleagues
Startups: 💸 Resilience raises $45 million for its cancer care startup - the startup co-founded and co-led by Celine Lazorthes is on a mission to improve the treatment journey for cancer patients and also help health practitioners and caregivers.
💸 Quan raises $1.15M from YC to tackle post-pandemic employee burnout - founded by Arosha Brouwer and Lucy Howie
💸 🤰🏼bloss, which connects expectant parents with experts, raises £1M pre-seed led by Antler - co-founded by Stephanie Desmond and Binky Felstead
💸 Byteboard nabs $5M seed to change the way engineers get hired - Byteboard is co-founded by Sargun Kaur and Nikke Hardson-Hurley. The seed round was led by Cowboy Ventures along with a diverse set of angel investors, with half being women and more than a third Black 👏🏽
💸 POC-Founded Fintech Raises $1.8 Million In VC To Help The Food Truck Industry - co-founded and led by Sofie Abdulrazaaq
🙌 Female entrepreneurs banked a record number of exits in Europe last year
VC: 💸 🌊 Portugal’s Indico Capital Partners launches €50M ocean tech ‘Blue Economy’ fund - co-founded by Cristina Fonseca, Indico Capital Partners was the first private institutional early-stage venture capital fund set up in Portugal
🎧 Soraya Darabi on Social Media, Startups and Empowering Founders - w/ Soraya Darabi of TMV & Global Transact and Danielle Newnham
Web3: ▶️ YouTube CEO Wojcicki says the video site has plans to capitalize on Web3 - the platform will be expanding to “help creators capitalize” on new technologies like NFTs
🎥 WTF is an NFT?!? Crypto for Beginners - launch event by BFF
🤓 Lighting up the Shadows of Web 3 - Wendy Xiao Schadeck of Northzone VC examines the values of Web 3.0 and their dark sides
👀 The Web3/Crypto/Metaverse Ecosystem Guide — From the Minds of Lightspeed - curated by Mercedes Bent of Lightspeed Ventures [US focus]
👀 Populating the Metaverse — an Overview of the Early 2022 Landscape - by Sabina Wizander and Beata Klein of Creandum [European focus]
3️⃣ Why star VC Katie Haun departed Andreessen Horowitz with an audacious plan to build a $1 billion crypto investing juggernaut - after making her name with big bets on Coinbase and OpenSea, as an a16z veteran, Katie’s new venture is on track to be the biggest Web3 fund raised by a solo female VC
🌏 “The biggest opportunity lies where impact and profit have an equal importance to the company” - features Agate Freimane, General Partner at Norrsken VC
“We truly believe that using impact investing as a strategy can even be a source of outperformance in financial returns.”
Women’s Wealth: 💸 ‘Crises reveal’: The pandemic changed how these women choose to spend their money [US-focus]
Women's Health: 👩🏽⚕️ Women’s Health Is More Than Female Anatomy and Our Reproductive System - by Halle Tecco and Julia Cheek
♿ As disabled women, our lives have always been erased. But in a pandemic, they’re urgently at stake.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, we hoped the world would start to learn some of the lessons the disabled community has long known. We wished they would realize that collective care is the way forward and that we are trying to advocate for a world for all.” - Mary Fashik and Corie Walsh
Climate: 🌎 Rihanna’s Foundation Donates $15 Million To Climate Justice - 18 climate justice organizations doing work in seven Caribbean nations and the United States will receive donations from the singer’s Clara Lionel Foundation.
“Climate disasters, which are growing in frequency and intensity, do not impact all communities equally, with communities of color and island nations facing the brunt of climate change.” - Rihanna
Fashion: 👙 Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty Lingerie Brand Raises $125 Million In Series C Funding After Opening First Retail Store - The funding will support the company’s foray into brick-and-mortar retail, international expansion, and the launch of new product lines
🩱 Kim Kardashian’s Skims Doubles Valuation to $3.2 Billion after raising $240M
Sports & Adventure: ⚽ A Rwandan is the first woman to officiate an Africa Cup of Nations match - Salima Mukansanga made history at the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) in Cameroon as the first woman referee to officiate a match in the tournament’s 65-year history
“It’s a privilege. It’s a pleasure to me, to the rest of African women referees. It’s [an] opportunity to open the door and to show that all African [women] are capable. They can reach that stage.” - Salima Mukansanga
⛷️ China’s American-Born Olympic Star Is Being Very Careful - ‘Teenage freestyle skier Eileen Gu is the daredevil face of Xi Jinping’s winter sports initiative and a sponsor’s dream: a gold-medal contender with no desire to talk politics.’
🛩 Teenage pilot Zara Rutherford completes solo round-world record - The British-Belgian aviator Zara Rutherford, 19, became the youngest woman to fly around the world solo, completing a more than 32,000-mile journey spanning five continents
Things to Ponder
When it comes to getting kids back to school, we're asking all the wrong questions - by Reshma Saujani, founder of The Marshall Plan for Moms & Girls Who Code
The Internet Is Failing Moms-to-Be [US-focus]
“Pregnancy apps, I quickly learned, aren’t in the business of providing comfort; they are a fantasy-land-cum-horror-show, providing little realistic information about the journey to parenthood. They capitalize on the excitement and anxiety of moms-to-be, peddling unrealistic expectations and even outright disinformation to sell ads and keep users engaged.” - Nina Jankowicz, disinformation expert
Ann Lai Filed a Lawsuit to Tell This Story - Lai quit her high-profile job in the VC industry and sounded an alarm about bad behavior in tech. She was nearly forced from the industry.
Women in same-gender partnerships face a double pay gap - Women in same-gender partnerships can experience discrimination based both on their gender and on their sexual orientation.
Women Who Drive For Uber and Lyft Are Being Left To Fend For Themselves - Ride-hailing platforms fail to protect women drivers against abusive riders. The drivers self-organize to protect each other.
Thank you for reading FemWealth! Have a lovely Sunday and an exciting week ahead!
Anamaria
Founder & Writer of FemWealth
P.S. If you liked this issue, please like & comment. Got feedback on how to make FemWealth more valuable for you? Please reply in the comments. Merci! 🥰