When we talk about revolutions, we tend to look back at pivotal moments in history, such as the Industrial Revolution, the Information Age, and the Digital Boom. However, according to Nil Adell-Mill, an entrepreneur, scientist, and AI engineer, the next industrial revolution is already here. This time, he believes, it's biological.
"We're living through two industrial revolutions at once," says Adell-Mill. "One in AI, where intelligence has become a tool for creation, and one in biology, where we're learning to engineer life itself. The convergence of these two is going to redefine how we make everything, from medicines to materials to fuels."
As the Co-Founder and Head of AI at Decycle Biosystems, Adell-Mill is at the forefront of this transformation. His company is building an AI-driven biomanufacturing platform designed to replace petrochemical production with cleaner, bio-based chemistry; a radical step toward sustainable manufacturing. The idea isn't just to make chemicals greener, but to make clean chemistry scalable and affordable.
From Engineering Minds to Engineering Molecules
Adell-Mill's story starts in Spain, where he studied biomedical engineering at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. There, he founded the university's first-ever iGEM synthetic biology team. This marked his early commitment to blending biology with technology. "That experience taught me how biology could be engineered," he recalls.
His journey soon took him to Duke University in the U.S., where he joined a neuroscience lab developing brain–machine interfaces, the same lab that inspired Neuralink's founders. Adell-Mill helped build a virtual-reality system for primates, used to study how the brain encodes motion. "That project opened my eyes to the power of connecting computation with biology and how algorithms could literally interact with neurons," he says.
After Duke, Adell-Mill pursued a master's in neural computation at ETH Zurich, one of the world's top institutions for AI and systems biology. There, he expanded his focus, working on projects that ranged from AI privacy in crypto startups to personalized cancer vaccines and molecular design at IBM Research. Across all of it, one thread persisted. This was using both natural and artificial intelligence to make biology more powerful.
A Pioneer in AI-Driven Immunotherapy
That philosophy eventually led Adell-Mill to the field of immunotherapy, where he co-invented a machine-learning method for predicting immune responses to novel proteins. This breakthrough is now protected by patents across the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China. The method became a key component in identifying neoantigen targets, directly supporting the development of both personalized and off-the-shelf cancer vaccines.
Even before the AI boom, Adell-Mill was introducing transformer-style models into immunotherapy pipelines as early as 2019. This was years before large language models became mainstream. "We used them not to generate text," he says, "but to generate biological insight."
His work culminated in the development of a precision-immunomics platform presented at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer and published in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer. These efforts contributed to vaccine platforms that reached first-in-human clinical trials, bridging the gap between computation and patient impact.
Today, he's applying the same AI and biological intelligence that transformed drug discovery to revolutionize chemistry at Adell-Mill's Decycle Biosystems.
The company's platform combines generative models with enzyme-design workflows to create cell-free systems capable of manufacturing key chemicals without fossil fuels. In essence, Decycle is teaching AI how to design enzymes that replace traditional industrial catalysts.
"Our aim is to build a new model for sustainable chemistry," Adell-Mill explains. "AI gives us the power to search molecular space in ways that humans never could, while biology gives us the machinery to make it real. Together, they can replace petrochemistry with biochemistry."
If successful, the approach could redefine entire supply chains, from plastics to fertilizers to pharmaceuticals. This will offer an alternative to the carbon-intensive manufacturing systems that dominate today's economy.
Navigating the Limits of AI
Despite the excitement surrounding AI, Adell-Mill remains grounded about the challenges. "Translating AI into robust, scalable tools for biology is still one of the hardest problems," he says. "The promise was that AI would solve drug discovery, but biology is humblingly complex."
He recalls attending Google Zurich lectures about transformers while still a student. A few years ago, models like AlphaFold reshaped the field. "It's incredible how far we've come, but even today, data remains the bottleneck," he notes.
Adell-Mill and his teams have learned to combine literature mining, synthetic data generation, and smarter lab automation to optimize what experiments matter most. "The goal isn't to run thousands of experiments," he says. "It's to run the ones that teach you the most."
For him, Decycle Biosystems represents more than a company. It's a proof of concept for a new industrial era. "The last industrial revolution was powered by oil," he says. "The next one will be powered by biological and artificial intelligence."
That revolution is already taking shape. From AI-discovered enzymes that digest plastic to cell-free systems producing green fuels. Adell-Mill's vision is to make those breakthroughs scalable, enabling industries to transition from extraction to regeneration.
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