For decades, chemistry has depended on fossil fuels. These are the invisible backbone of nearly every product we use, from plastics and fertilizers to pharmaceuticals. However, a quiet revolution is taking shape in the labs of Decycle Biosystems, where Nil Adell Mill is combining artificial intelligence with biology to build an entirely new foundation for manufacturing chemicals.
“AI gives us the power to search molecular space in ways that humans never could,” Adell Mill explains. “Biology gives us the machinery to make it real.”
At Decycle Biosystems, they are developing a cell-free biomanufacturing platform that uses generative models and enzyme-design workflows to produce chemicals from carbon sources. In essence, they’re teaching AI how to design enzymes and novel biochemical routes that produce chemicals in ways that evolution never was wired to. This approach combined with cell-free techniques—by decoupling chemistry from cellular growth—enables enzyme cascades to be scaled with far greater efficiency, control, and economic viability.
It’s an ambitious vision: to use AI not just to discover new molecules, but to redesign the very way the world makes things.
From cancer vaccines to clean chemistry
Adell-Mill’s journey began far from the world of industrial chemistry. He studied biomedical engineering at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, where he founded an iGEM synthetic biology team in Barcelona – the first of its kind in his university.
He says that following the team’s success, a ‘wave’ of other universities followed in their lead and started their own teams.
Early in his career, he was drawn to the interface between neuroscience and computation, working at Duke University’s neuroengineering lab. This is the same research environment that later inspired the creators of Neuralink, where he built virtual reality systems and brain-machine interfaces to study how the brain encodes motion.
That multidisciplinary curiosity defined Adell-Mill’s path. After a master’s in Neural Computation at ETH Zurich, he worked across domains, from privacy-focused AI startups to molecular design at IBM Research.
He was brought in by the founders of a lab automation startup to co-create and lead the computational molecule discovery team. Here, he spent 2 years building a platform for pharmaceutical candidate discovery using AI informed by the automated laboratory capabilities of the company.
It was in immunotherapy where his impact first took global shape. As an AI researcher, he co-invented a machine-learning method for predicting immune responses to novel proteins, now protected by patents across the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China. The method became integral to prioritizing neoantigen targets, contributing to programs including a first-in-human personalized NSCLC vaccine and off-the-shelf cancer vaccine platforms.
He later helped lead the development of an AI-driven precision immunomics platform, presented at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer and published in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer. His work directly contributed to clinical trials, patents, and scientific publications, establishing him as one of the new generation of scientists who bridge computation and biology at scale.
“We’re living through two industrial revolutions”
Adell-Mill sees today’s moment as pivotal for both biotech and for civilization itself. “We’re living through two industrial revolutions at once,” he says. “One in AI, where intelligence is becoming a creative tool. And one in biology, where we’re learning to engineer life itself, changing how we make medicine, food, and materials. The intersection of those two revolutions is where the next century of innovation will happen.”
It was that vision that led him to co-found Decycle Biosystems. The company’s mission is to build a new model for sustainable chemistry, using AI to engineer enzymes capable of driving industrial reactions from novel carbon sources. The implications reach far beyond biotech, from plastics and fertilizers to materials and energy storage.
If successful, Decycle’s approach could redefine entire global supply chains, offering an alternative to the carbon-intensive manufacturing systems that dominate today’s economy.
Turning AI insight into biological action
The scientific and technical challenge behind this is immense. While AI can predict new-to-nature biochemical routes and generate novel proteins, translating those predictions into functional, stable, and manufacturable enzymatic cascades enzymes is notoriously difficult. Adell-Mill knows this firsthand.
Before launching Decycle, he spent years grappling with the data bottlenecks of AI-driven biology. “AI is like a microscope,” Adell-Mill explains. “It helps you see possibilities you’d never find on your own.”
To overcome that gap, his teams built pipelines that combined synthetic data generation, literature mining, and smart lab automation to accelerate experimentation. Those lessons are now powering Decycle’s enzyme-design workflows, where AI is collaborating with biology.
Lessons from the AI-bio frontier
Adell-Mill has lived through AI’s transformation from niche academic field to global industry. “I still remember attending talks in Zurich where the authors of “Attention Is All You Need” presented the transformer model that helped ignite today’s large language models,” he recalls. “It’s surreal to see that same architecture now driving breakthroughs across protein design, chemistry, and drug discovery.”
But he’s quick to caution against hype. “Translating AI into something that consistently works in biology takes humility. Data quality, experiment design, and feedback loops matter as much as the models themselves.”
That realism, combined with deep technical fluency, defines his leadership. His philosophy is simple: “Go deep, but stay flexible. Master something in painful detail. But when your curiosity shifts, let it. Expertise transfers more than people think.”
At Decycle Biosystems, Adell-Mill’s focus is for the company to develop a new generation of cell-free systems that can produce key industrial molecules without fermentation, fossil fuels, or complex supply chains, making sustainability not just possible, but profitable.
“The ultimate goal is to make sustainable chemistry scalable and affordable,” Adell-Mill says. “AI and biology together can unlock a manufacturing model that’s both intelligent and circular.”
As he continues to advise startups in health and manufacturing, Adell-Mill remains deeply engaged in the wider tech-bio community, helping shape the emerging discipline that merges computation, molecular science, and design.
His message to the next wave of founders is both visionary and practical: “The tools we’re building today will determine what the next industrial revolution looks like. If we teach intelligence how to work with biology, we can reinvent how the world makes things, for good.”
