A Dallas biotech writing cells like software - with a programming language for life called L++.
Omphalos Lifesciences, Dallas, Texas - the startup treating the cell as a computer and DNA as its source code.
Omphalos Lifesciences starts from a stubborn analogy: the cell is a machine, DNA is its code, and biologists have never had a decent programming language to work with it.
The company builds software for programmable biology. Its core products - the Life Designer platform, the OmVisim development environment, and a language called L++ - let researchers describe, simulate, and visualize living systems instead of discovering their behavior one wet-lab experiment at a time. The pitch is that a cell can be modeled, run, and optimized much the way an engineer compiles and tests a program.
The name is deliberate. "Omphalos" is Greek for navel - a symbolic center or origin point. The company wants to sit at the root of how biological systems get designed, not at the edge selling a single molecule. That is a platform bet, and platform bets take patience.
What makes the story credible is the resume behind it. Founder Daehwan Kim is a computational biologist whose sequence-analysis tools - HISAT, HISAT2, TopHat, Centrifuge - are cited more than 75,000 times and sit in genomics pipelines around the world. He did not arrive at "biology should be programmable" as a slogan. He arrived at it after a career spent translating biological data into computation.
"Just as C++ simplified machine code for computers, L++ aims to simplify DNA manipulation for biological systems."
Omphalos is early-stage - directory listings put headcount somewhere between roughly five and fifty people - and it recorded a Series A around late 2022. The interesting numbers are not the financials, which remain undisclosed, but the technical footprint: a working programming language, a running virtual cell, and validation from NVIDIA and a federal health agency.
A high-level programming language for biology, conceived as a human-readable alternative to raw DNA. The idea mirrors software history: nobody writes in binary anymore, so why should biologists effectively still write in it?
Described as a digital bio-operating system - it lets biologists model, simulate, and visualize complex biosystems for drug discovery, precision medicine, biomanufacturing, and education.
A life-programming and development environment - an IDE for L++ used to design, simulate, and visualize virtual life forms. The developer-tools layer that makes the language usable.
The company's first virtual organism. Early versions modeled a single cell; later releases add populations, growth rates, and perturbations, working toward a roadmap of 100+ modeled biological processes.
A biologist specifies a biosystem in the L++ language rather than wrestling raw genetic sequence.
OmVisim turns that description into a runnable model of molecular pathways and cell behavior.
Life Designer simulates the system - growth, response, perturbation - and visualizes the result.
Findings feed drug discovery, precision-medicine digital twins, or biomanufacturing before wet-lab spend.
"A new foundation and infrastructure for life sciences - one where cells can be written, simulated, and optimized like software."
The most expensive part of drug discovery is not the successes - it is the failures you only uncover after years and millions at the bench.
Omphalos's argument is that if you can model a cell accurately enough, you can move some of that trial and error into software. Run the experiment in silico first, throw away the losers cheaply, and take fewer, better-informed candidates into the physical lab.
Teams that want to screen and de-risk candidates computationally before committing wet-lab resources.
Academic and federally-backed groups modeling pathogens, pathways, and biological processes.
Efforts that need a patient-specific digital twin to test treatments against an individual's biology.
The "virtual cell" is having a moment - the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has a well-funded AI Virtual Cell program, and companies like Turbine.ai and Cellarity model biology to find drugs. Omphalos's distinguishing bet is the language layer: rather than only building models, it is building L++ as the abstraction that lets biologists write those models themselves. It is the difference between shipping an application and shipping a compiler.
FIG. 1 — Qualitative positioning, illustrative. Bars reflect editorial reading of public information, not audited metrics.
Computational and systems biologist, former assistant professor at UT Southwestern's Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics. Creator of HISAT, HISAT2, TopHat and Centrifuge - sequencing tools cited 75,000+ times. Inventor of the L++ language.
Experimental biologist with a PhD in cell and systems biology and a co-developer of L++. Bridges the wet-lab side of the company with its computational platform, reimagining biology as programmable systems.
The model is B2B software for the life sciences - licensing the virtual cell platform, L++ tooling, and simulation environment to pharma, biotech, and research organizations. That commercial motion is supplemented by grants and accelerator support that fund the science without diluting the cap table.
Member of NVIDIA's startup program, using accelerated computing to scale its programmable virtual cell.
Selected for non-dilutive support to model high-priority hospital-acquired pathogens for pathogen-agnostic antimicrobial strategy.
Academic collaborator on L++ and virtual-cell research via the Kim Lab.
Research partners supporting biosystem modeling through Omphalos Korea.
Daehwan Kim and collaborators establish the company in Dallas to pursue programmable biology.
The company records a Series A to fund development of its virtual cell platform.
Publishes "Biology Becomes Programming" and releases Virtual E. coli Version 0.1.
Joins NVIDIA Inception and secures BARDA-backed support to simulate hospital-acquired pathogens.