Look­ing to build new smart cells, Blue­Rock teams with Tim Lu's Sen­ti Bio in 'sec­ond-or­der' en­gi­neer­ing al­liance

Blue­Rock, the Ver­sant-backed and Bay­er-owned biotech best known for its Parkin­son’s cell ther­a­py, has been qui­et­ly lay­ing out much grander plans for their tech­nol­o­gy.

The com­pa­ny, CEO Emile Nuwaysir ex­plains, doesn’t just want to recre­ate the healthy hu­man cell — as they’ve done in Parkin­son’s — but al­so to ma­nip­u­late it or add whole new fea­tures: a so-called kill-switch that al­lows doc­tors to con­trol cells af­ter they’ve been im­plant­ed, for ex­am­ple, or mol­e­c­u­lar “sen­sors” that pre­vent the cell from func­tion­ing any­where but in the pre­cise tis­sue it’s need­ed.

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