MelliCell, Inc.
Ben Pope is the Founder, President, and Chief Scientific Officer of MelliCell, Inc., since 2020, where focus lies on pioneering therapeutics for diabetes and obesity through innovative technology that models weight gain in human fat cells. Prior to this, Ben Pope was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University from 2015 to 2020, contributing to human adipocyte and islet engineering technology for diabetes and systems biology research. Ben Pope also served as a Graduate Research Assistant and Graduate Teaching Assistant at Florida State University between 2008 and 2014, where research involved chromosome and stem cell biology, alongside teaching laboratory courses. Earlier experience includes an Undergraduate Research Assistant role at Brigham Young University in 2007, working on hybrid tomato plants for genetic markers of viral resistance. Ben Pope holds a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from Florida State University and a BS in Genetics and Biotechnology from Brigham Young University.
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MelliCell, Inc.
MelliCell develops therapeutics for diabetes and obesity using proprietary technologies that model of weight gain in human fat cells in vitro. Our core technology enables discovery of therapeutic targets and leads, while reducing the time and money required for efficacy screening. It efficiently turns human stem cells into fat cells and accelerates their growth to sizes that are thousands of times larger than conventional limits and that match the sizes of mature fat cells in adults. Changes in fat cell size are how adults gain (or lose) weight, and increased fat cell size predicts diabetes better than obesity per se. The products we develop will treat obesity and diabetes by shrinking fat cell size and by preventing compromised metabolism in enlarged cells. We differentiate ourselves from existing therapies (e.g. GLP-1 analogs, SGLT2 inhibitors, anorexiants, intestinal lipase inhibitors, insulin secretagogues) by focusing on adipocyte-intrinsic mechanisms of action enabled by our core technology.