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David van Dijk Taught AI to Read Cells. Now He Wants It to Predict What Biology Does Next
A Yale computer scientist turned gene lists into sentences, then carried the idea from an academic lab into a startup. The bet behind CellType is plain enough to say and difficult enough to occupy a career: biology can become a language machines learn to predict.
CellType
CellType is a Y Combinator W26 biotech startup building an 'agentic drug company' that simulates human biology to de-risk drug discovery. Founded by Yale professor David van Dijk and ML engineer Ivan Vrkic, it pairs Cell2Sentence, a 27-billion-parameter biological foundation model built with Google DeepMind, with AI agents that run the discovery pipeline from hypothesis to compound screening. The goal is to replace animal models and cell lines with computational simulations of human biology and cut preclinical failure rates.