Fabian Gerlinghaus

Fabian Gerlinghaus is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cellares, a South San Francisco biotech company building the world's first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) for cell therapy. An aerospace engineer turned life-science entrepreneur, he co-founded Cellares in 2019 after spotting a critical gap: FDA-approved CAR-T therapies were sitting ready while patients died on waitlists because manufacturing couldn't scale. His Cell Shuttle platform — a fully automated, factory-in-a-box system processing 16 patient batches simultaneously — has attracted $630M in funding, a $380M partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb, and FDA's Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation. TIME magazine named it one of 2025's most important inventions.