Cell Mind

Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

Industry: (Cell and Gene Therapy) Using AI to expand use and access to CAR-T cell therapy for blood cancers.

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Alfred Landik

Brief Description of Solution: CAR-T is a cancer therapy that uses genetically modified cells to kill cancer cells. Less than 20 percent of cancer patients eligible for CAR-T ever receive this lifesaving treatment. Cell Mind uses AI technology to improve the patient selection process by predicting safety and efficacy outcomes, which leads to more effective treatment and lower costs.

Funding Dollars: Not disclosed

What led you to launch this venture? I am committed to longevity and expanding human lifespan. I believe this is what God wants from us. So many people die before they should in part because their bodies are too damaged to keep living. I’m very interested in finding ways we can minimize this damage, stay healthier for longer, and improve the quality of our lives.

I began my career as a PhD candidate pursuing scientific research, but I wanted to have an immediate impact, so I decided to start a company instead. Business school was very helpful in providing me with the skills to make an impact. I also learned a great deal about stem cells and CAR-T cell therapy and saw an opportunity to make an impact in expanding access to this blood cancer treatment. CAR-T saves so many lives compared to the previous treatments that have been used.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with the venture? We recently signed an agreement with the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and the University of North Carolina Hematology Department that will allow us to collect patient data needed to develop our AI algorithm. It is a significant step for the company.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? The biggest challenge was establishing partnerships with hospitals involved in CAR-T therapy to access the critical information needed to develop our models. I received tremendous support from our student technology ventures team, who guided me step-by-step through the process of building these partnerships. With their help, we successfully navigated the complexities and achieved our goal.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? The MBA program has been conducive in many ways. I gained a solid understanding of the U.S. health care system, including its payers and structural relationships. We took courses on commercializing technology and marketing research and worked on projects that closely aligned with my field. These experiences broadened my perspective, deepened my understanding, and equipped me to work efficiently toward my goals.

What founder or entrepreneur inspired you to start your own entrepreneurial journey? How did he or she prove motivational to you? Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine, was a big inspiration for me. I believe he’s among the most prominent people in longevity research right now, and a titan in the field. He’s also a Johns Hopkins University graduate. I believe his example helped me a lot and gave me a path to follow.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? Business Communication was very helpful. I’ve been a technical person most of my life, and I never really paid much attention to the important aspects of communication. I believe that Business Communication course gave me a more comprehensive view of how to approach my business, and it will continue to benefit me later in life. As an international student from Ukraine, Business Communication helped me appreciate and understand how others communicate. It also made me a better listener and prompted me to ask questions.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? Professor Steven Cohen teaches Business Communication at Carey Business School, and his lessons were very motivating. He once said, “If you want to start a company, start a company now. If you want to become somebody, become somebody right now. If you have a dream, go and push for it. If you can’t do this, surround yourself with people who will convince you that it is not a good idea to go that way and you’ll never take that path.” His words were very inspiring to me.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? The Johns Hopkins ecosystem is extremely helpful for starting a new business. In my first year as an MBA student, I took a six-week Summer Incubator course at the Johns Hopkins Pava Center, which helps student ventures ready to take a “deep dive” into building their startups. After the Summer Incubator, I felt like everything moving and starting to grow. I then got involved with the Spark business accelerator program at Johns Hopkins Tech Ventures. They provided a lot of training to help refine our pitches, public speaking, and marketing materials. Spark also helped me make connections within Johns Hopkins, which led to the signing of our data-sharing agreement.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? We want to develop our Cell Mind platform to not only help improve patient selection, but help therapists as well. We want to accumulate data and find a way to help therapists make informed choices that are more affordable, and more optimized for their patients. We also want to expand our solution beyond CAR-T to other forms of therapy.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? I’m very satisfied with the progress we’ve made with Cell Mind. Throughout the development process, I think it was important to develop personal relationships with people with whom you collaborate. So, I think the first step and then is to create trust in your relationships. Trust is probably the number one thing that you need for success.

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