Michael Todhunter is a biochemist and bioengineer whose work focuses on building, studying, and optimizing human cell culture systems. Trained at the University of California, San Francisco, Todhunter worked in the Gartner lab on methods for engineering multicellular tissues with defined structure. His early research helped advance DNA-programmed assembly of cells, a technique for arranging living cells into controlled three-dimensional tissue-like structures. That work contributed to broader efforts to make organoid and tissue models more reproducible, programmable, and useful for studying development, disease, and cellular organization.

Todhunter’s later research moved toward mammary epithelial biology, organoid culture, and aging-related questions. At City of Hope, he worked on high-throughput mammary organoid systems, including microcontainer-based approaches that allow large numbers of comparable organoids to be followed over time. This work reflects a recurring theme in his career: using engineering, automation, imaging, and quantitative analysis to make cell biology more scalable and experimentally precise.

More recently, Todhunter has focused on autonomous biological research. He proposed closed-loop culture media engineering, in which robotic systems formulate, test, image, and iteratively improve media recipes for cultured human cells. This work led into Dragonase, where he is co-founder and chief scientific officer. Dragonase applies AI-driven and robotic wet-lab systems to longevity-oriented cell biology, with an emphasis on optimizing culture conditions for hematopoietic stem cells. Across his career, Todhunter’s work has aimed to convert labor-intensive wet-lab biology into a more programmable, automated, and quantitative discipline.