Alla
Zamarayeva

The gentlest way to edit a cell

Most gene editing starts with a virus. You load the genetic cargo into a viral vector, send it into the cell, and hope it delivers. It works, but it is expensive, it is slow, and the regulators ask a lot of hard questions. Alla Zamarayeva runs a company built on a different premise: skip the virus entirely.

At CellFE - the name compresses "Cell Fluidics Engineering" - cells flow through microfluidic channels and get briefly, mechanically squeezed. That squeeze opens a temporary window for genetic payloads to slip inside. No viral vector. The pitch is gentler treatment, faster recovery, and a higher yield of healthy cells coming out the other side. The platform is built for the hardest customers in the field: T cells for CAR-T, plus stem cells and iPSCs.

Zamarayeva is the co-founder and chief executive. She is the one in front of investors, on conference stages, and signing the partnerships. In 2023 she led the company to a $22 million Series A, led by M Ventures with GreatPoint Ventures and Riverine Ventures alongside.

That sentence is the whole strategy in one breath. Cell therapies can be close to miraculous and close to unaffordable at the same time. The cost is largely in the manufacturing: long timelines, specialized facilities, low yields. Zamarayeva's argument is that if you fix the manufacturing layer - make it cheaper, faster, smaller - you change who actually gets the treatment. The endgame she keeps describing is point-of-care: editing cells near the patient instead of shipping them across the country.

Squeeze, deliver, recover

The technology trades chemistry and biology for something closer to plumbing and physics. Strip away the jargon and the platform does three things in sequence.

The advantage CellFE points to is its handling of large genetic payloads and complex edits that viral methods struggle with, while keeping cells healthy enough to actually be used. In 2025 the company announced a collaboration with the CDMO Made Scientific to run pilot-scale studies on non-viral and hybrid workflows for both autologous and allogeneic T cell therapies.

A footnote that became a company

Founders love to claim destiny. Zamarayeva's version is more accidental and more believable. The story CellFE tells is that during her doctoral research at Berkeley she came across a transformative piece of microfluidics work happening at Georgia Tech. She didn't invent that core idea in a flash of genius. She noticed it, understood what it could become, and decided it deserved a company.

That instinct - spotting the value in someone else's research and having the nerve to build on it - is its own kind of talent. CellFE was incorporated in 2018 with a founding team that paired her with Georgia Tech professor Alex Alexeev, Stanford-trained Todd Sulchek, and Anna Liu. By January 2019 she was CEO.

Her own training is unusually wide. Before the Berkeley engineering PhD there was a chemical engineering degree from the City College of New York and, earlier, a business degree. As an undergraduate she was a Goldwater Scholar, the national award for promising young scientists, and she did research stints at Princeton and the Levich Institute. At Berkeley she held the William S. Floyd Jr. Fellowship, and her science earned write-ups in Scientific American and Discover.

Career timeline

Off the clock

The same person who optimizes cell throughput for a living lists one hobby on the company's own about page: motorcycles. It is a small detail, and it fits. A motorcycle is the most direct possible relationship between input and output, an exercise in control at speed. The throughline, if you want one, is throughput - the engineer's instinct to get more out of a system without breaking what matters.