Known at the root, intercepted early.
A world where disease is known at its root and intercepted before symptoms, not after the damage is done.
Who we are
The purpose, story, and organization behind Cytognosis.
Cytognosis exists so that no one has to wait years for answers science already has the tools to reveal. This page gathers our purpose, the story behind the science, how we’re organized and funded, our roadmap, and how lived experience and clinical judgment shape the work.
Our Purpose
Why Cytognosis exists.
Before diagnosis. Before symptoms. There’s Cytognosis.
One vision. One mission. Four values that keep both honest.
Replacing diagnosis with cytognosis.
Finding the root causes of disease before symptoms, and matching treatment to each person’s biology.
Values, non-negotiable.
Treat the cause, not the symptom
We look for what is driving an illness, not only what it looks like, and build tools that act on the cause itself.
Health autonomy as a human right
Understanding your own health is not a privilege of geography or income. It belongs to everyone.
Knowledge that belongs to humanity, not shareholders
Every model, dataset, and method we build ships as an open, public good, not a proprietary asset.
Your data stays yours
Intelligence runs close to the person. Raw biological data stays under their control, always.
Our Story
The story behind the science.
Cytognosis began with a question medicine struggled to answer: what connects conditions that look unrelated, when every specialist sees only one fragment?
Fragmented snapshots→ A coherent map
Loading the founder’s story…
The arc
From personal motivation to founding Cytognosis.
-
01 · Personal motivation
37 years, ten specialists, one hidden mutation.
A research scientist living with unexplained symptoms, misdiagnosed across ten specialties, until his own training named the true cause: a single ultra-rare mutation.
-
02 · Academia
Purdue. MIT. The Broad Institute.
Twenty years of computational biology: multi-cohort atlases of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and open-source tools researchers still use, including ACTIONet, TAME, and Kavosh.
-
03 · Industry
insitro. GenBio AI.
Machine learning applied to biology at industry scale, the same conviction that later built Yar’s first working MVP solo, because the tool did not yet exist.
-
04 · Founding Cytognosis
A 501(c)(3), built to belong to everyone.
Incorporated in Delaware, October 2025. Twenty years of computational biology and one personal journey became the founding purpose: open tools, so no one else waits decades for an answer.
Founded so no one else has to wait decades for an answer that was knowable all along.
Our Foundation
How we’re built, and how we’re funded.
Cytognosis Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 39-4383634), and it is built to stay one. The Foundation owns the platform’s core intellectual property, keeps a permanent license to use everything we build for open, mission-aligned research, and holds governance authority over any commercial arm. This is the body that keeps the work accountable to patients and the public, not to any single investor or product.
Execution and scaling happen through separate for-profit arms, each structured as a public benefit corporation. These arms are not required to sit inside Cytognosis. They are independently incorporated, license technology from the Foundation, and raise their own commercial capital to carry a product through regulatory approval and real-world scale, the part of the journey that philanthropy alone cannot fund. A company built around Yar, our first consumer companion, is one example of an arm that could take this path.
Pairing a mission-locked Foundation with one or more public benefit corporations lets each do what it does best. A nonprofit alone tends to hand off its open infrastructure just as the hardest clinical work begins; commercial pressure alone tends to erode access commitments the moment they cost money. Connecting the two through licensing and governance, rather than a single balance sheet, protects both the mission and the momentum.
This is our governance approach, and we are developing it with legal counsel as the organization grows.
Board of Directors
Shahin Mohammadi
Board Chair & CEO
Ananth Grama
Board Co-chair
Madhvi Menon
Board Scientific Advisor
Beyond the Board, we are building complementary advisory bodies to keep lived experience and clinical judgment close to the work.
Cytognosis is not a diagnostic or treatment service. Nothing here replaces the judgment of a qualified clinician; what we build is meant to inform research and, over time, support care alongside a person’s own care team, not in place of one.
We are establishing two complementary structures to keep real-world experience and clinical judgment close to the work. A Lived-Experience Advisory brings people with direct experience of the conditions we study into how we decide what to build, and how to build it responsibly. A Patient and Community Advisory serves as a liaison for clinical-practitioner input, and helps make sure that what we build actually reaches, and benefits, the people it is meant for.
Both are still forming. We are in active conversations with patient-advocacy, clinical, and community organizations to help seat founding members over the coming months, and we will share concrete updates as seats are filled rather than claim readiness before it exists.
If your organization works in patient advocacy, clinical care, or community health and wants to help shape this work, we would like to hear from you.
Our Roadmap
Where the work goes from here.
A phased build, from research infrastructure to equitable global access, roughly five years per phase. Every phase publishes its methods and results in the open, as a nonprofit public good.
-
Phase 1 · Research and development
Building the platform, in the open.
Cytoverse and Cytoscope research and development, multimodal data aggregation, and open-source tooling, with neuropsychiatry as the first proof of concept, released as a public good from the start.
-
Phase 2 · Clinical and commercialization
Clinical validation, in the open.
Prospective studies with academic and clinical collaborators validate the platform’s findings, alongside a mission-locked path to bring validated tools to the people who need them.
-
Phase 3 · Globalization and equitable access
Expanding access, everywhere.
Broadening access to the platform’s research tools and findings through regional partners, so geography and income do not decide who benefits from earlier answers.