Cell engineering is the purposeful process of adding, deleting, or modifying genetic sequences in living cells to achieve biological engineering goals such as altering cell production, changing cell growth and proliferation requirements, adding or removing cell functions, and many more. Cell engineering often makes use of  DNA technology to achieve these modifications as well as closely related tissue engineering methods. Cell engineering can be characterized as an intermediary level in the increasingly specific disciplines of biological engineering which includes organ engineering, tissue engineering, protein engineering, and genetic engineering.
The field of cellular engineering is gaining more traction as biomedical research advances in tissue engineering and becomes more specific. Publications in the field have gone from several thousand in the early 2000s to nearly 40,000 in 2020.