Cell Design Labs

Cell Design Labs, Inc. was a biotherapeutics company based at 5858 Horton Street, Emeryville, California, that engineered immune cells into "smart, living therapies" for cancer and other diseases. Its platform was a toolkit of proprietary molecular modules — including synthetic Notch (synNOTCH) receptors and programmable, combinatorial-antigen CAR-T circuits developed out of Wendell Lim's lab at UCSF — deployed inside an immune cell to program its specificity and control its killing force, so a therapy recognizes a disease signature and neutralizes it without harming adjacent tissue. The company ran an exclusive research collaboration with Kite Pharma (announced June 2016) on molecular on/off switches for CAR T-cell immunotherapies, and was acquired by Gilead Sciences, announced 7 December 2017. Cell Design Labs no longer operates as an independent company: celldesignlabs.com is dead (DNS resolves to a parked address, HTTP times out; the archived site shows an expired Squarespace subscription). It published no developer program, API, documentation, SDK, or GitHub organization, and none exists to enrich.

Cell Design Labs is profiled on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Company, Healthcare, Biotechnology, Cell Therapy, and Immunotherapy.

2.2/100 minimal ▬ flat Agent 0/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0
0 APIs
CompanyHealthcareBiotechnologyCell TherapyImmunotherapyOncologySynthetic BiologyCartAcquiredDefunct

Kin Score

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0
Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Health regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.
Create-or-Update Ergonomics could not be measured. We hold no machine-readable contract for this provider to read, so there is nothing to measure a write surface against. Excluded rather than scored zero: never-measured and measured-empty are different facts. Publishing an OpenAPI is what makes this facet — and several others — scorable at all.
The six quality facets above are damped to 85 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 15. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 85% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.
Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/cell-design-labs: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Resources

Other 1

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

Source (apis.yml)

apis.yml Raw ↑
aid: cell-design-labs
deliveryModel:
  model: unknown
  open_source: false
  commercial: false
  callable_host: false
  label: Delivery model not determined — needs a product licence on record
  confidence: low
  source:
  - none
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source: []
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/cell-design-labs.png
name: Cell Design Labs
description: 'Cell Design Labs, Inc. was a biotherapeutics company based at 5858 Horton Street, Emeryville, California, that
  engineered immune cells into "smart, living therapies" for cancer and other diseases. Its platform was a toolkit of proprietary
  molecular modules — including synthetic Notch (synNOTCH) receptors and programmable, combinatorial-antigen CAR-T circuits
  developed out of Wendell Lim''s lab at UCSF — deployed inside an immune cell to program its specificity and control its
  killing force, so a therapy recognizes a disease signature and neutralizes it without harming adjacent tissue. The company
  ran an exclusive research collaboration with Kite Pharma (announced June 2016) on molecular on/off switches for CAR T-cell
  immunotherapies, and was acquired by Gilead Sciences, announced 7 December 2017. Cell Design Labs no longer operates as
  an independent company: celldesignlabs.com is dead (DNS resolves to a parked address, HTTP times out; the archived site
  shows an expired Squarespace subscription). It published no developer program, API, documentation, SDK, or GitHub organization,
  and none exists to enrich.'
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/cell-design-labs/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- kleiner-perkins
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: no-api-surface
x-status: acquired
x-acquired-by: Gilead Sciences
x-acquired-announced: '2017-12-07'
x-operating: false
x-website-status: dead
x-archived-website: http://web.archive.org/web/20180423192230/http://www.celldesignlabs.com/
specificationVersion: '0.23'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-20'
tags:
- Company
- Healthcare
- Biotechnology
- Cell Therapy
- Immunotherapy
- Oncology
- Synthetic Biology
- Cart
- Acquired
- Defunct
tags_raw:
- Company
- Healthcare
- Biotechnology
- Cell Therapy
- Immunotherapy
- Oncology
- Synthetic Biology
- CAR-T
- Acquired
- Defunct
apis: []
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-20'
  status: nochange
  artifacts_added: 0
  pass: local-v1
  notes: Company is defunct (acquired by Gilead Sciences, Dec 2017); primary domain celldesignlabs.com does not serve HTTP
    and its www host does not resolve. No developer portal, API, docs, SDK, package, .well-known, or GitHub org exists. Probed
    the live domain plus the Wayback archive; identity fields upgraded only.
common:
- type: ParentCompany
  url: https://apis.io/providers/gilead-sciences/
  name: Gilead Sciences
  x-relationship: acquired
  x-evidence: The company ran an exclusive research collaboration with Kite Pharma (announced June 2016) on molecular on/off
    switches for CAR T-cell immunotherapies, and was acquired by Gilead Sciences, announced 7 December 2017.

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