About Us

Our Team

Lumacell’s key personnel

Our Team

Uniting excellence for singular breakthroughs in health data.

Daniel Cohen

Daniel Cohen

Co-Founder & CEO

Daniel studied bioengineering at GWU and has been an independent biotechnology industry analyst for 8 years.

Mit Patel

Mit Patel

Co-founder & COO

Mit has over a decade’s experience as a business and technology consultant.

Lex Beresnev

Lex Beresnev

Co-Founder & CTO

Lex is a freelance design engineer with 10 years’ industrial design, CAD, and rapid prototyping experience.

Our Advisors

Lumacell’s advisors

Key Support

We are guided by some of the most respected names in pathology.

Dr. Patrick Van Dijick

Collaborator

VIB Group leader since 1997; extensive experience with industrialized yeast cells; authored 200+ papers on yeast biology.

Laila Massuda-Cohen

Laila Massuda-Cohen

Interim CFO

Certified Public Accountant (CPA); Chartered Global Management Accountant (CGMA)

Russ Peloquin

Russ Peloquin

Advisor

Over 20 years of experience in diagnostics (10 as a CCO), including two company exits.

Edward Buthusiem

Advisor

Former legal and business development executive and currently a Managing Director in BRG’s healthcare practice, a global consulting advisory firm.

Collaborations

Proven results in world-class labs

Notable Collaborations

We are building the foundation of LumaCell with support from top laboratories.

KU Leuven

Genetically modified yeast cells which can express human GPCRs of diagnostic interest. Upon ligand binding and activation of the G-alpha pathway, the cells produce a fluorescent signal. These cells are based upon commercial use yeast and therefore can be industrially scaled and deployed in a multi-well plate. We have designed a template cell which allows us to rapidly swap out receptor constructs, At the moment, the system has been demonstrated for CB1 expression and binding to active agonists of the receptor via our collaborator lab at KU Leuven. These strains have been transferred to 3rd party partner labs in the US for registration enabling studies (concluding by year end) to start commercializing the high throughput multi-well solution in the first half of 2025.

University of Texas, Austin

Lumacell has engaged with the University of Texas, Austin (UT) who has developed and demonstrated a machine learning guided system capable of predicting mutations to the receptor construct which facilitate functional expression. The results of their efforts have been published on the opiate receptors in Nature [1]. As a result of our engagement, we have secured an option to exclusively license the existing sensors in UT’s for opioids as well as the rights to develop our own biosensors against other targets (e.g., Incretins, Amylin etc). These will take approximately 18-24 months to complete.

Mission Statement

AI-enabled personal health

Mission Statement

Give doctors and patients unprecedented control with AI-enabled personalized health.

Lumacell will revolutionize the way we optimize our health by giving us previously unobtainable insights into our individual biochemistry and neurochemistry.

We will help quantify and optimize the latest prescriptions for metabolic disease

According to the CDC, an estimated 38.4 million Americans suffer with diabetes and 100 million Americans are obese per TFAH. To address this significant healthcare issue, 1 in eight US adults are turning to an emergent class of medications which target GLP-1 like Mounjaro®, Ozempic®, Wegovy®, and Zepbound®.

Many patients on these therapies are nonadherent, with only 47% of patients at 6 months, 29% at one year, and 15% at two years remaining on treatment. Other GPCRs targets are being explored in the incretin family (Glucagon, GIP, GLP-1) as well as Cannabinoids and Amylins.

With our companion diagnostic tooling we will:

  • Stratify patients by baseline physiology, helping to guide treatment selection and dosing for drug developers and physicians
  • Monitor treatment effects, especially in the crucial first few weeks after starting therapy to identify risk of developing GI toxicities which are in large part responsible for dropouts
  • Improve overall pharmacovigilance, especially for patients taking GLP-1 products produced by compounding pharmacies which may not have the same potency as the prescribed compound.
  • Identify drug-drug interactions (DDIs) with commonly used substances like cannabinoids that may not always be prescribed.

We will broadly and effectively address the mismanagement of prescription drugs

Non optimized medications are estimated to be responsible for 275,689 deaths per year in the United States alone as of 2016.

We will transform the possibilities of controlled and accurate pain management

The inability to understand and control patient pain with real-time, continuously measured scientific accuracy is a significant unmet medical need severely lacking any effective diagnostic solution.

We need better solutions to objectively identify dependence and disorder and offer treatment it in a safe and effective way

Lumacell will repurpose our toxicology panel to provide one. Our platform can be leveraged to:

Contact Us

Let’s discuss how your efforts can gain unprecedented physiological insights from single-molecule sensors.