An Interview with Nicolas Wolikow - Cure51

1. Let’s start with the big picture — what inspired the founding of Cure51, and what core mission drives the company today?

The original spark behind Cure51 came from a simple but powerful observation: some patients with very advanced cancer live far beyond expectations—and yet we rarely ask why. In most oncology R&D models, these exceptional survivors are statistical outliers, often excluded from clinical analysis. At Cure51, we decided to flip that thinking. What if these patients actually held the biological keys to long-term survival?
Our mission is to systematically decode the biology of these exceptional survivors across multiple cancer types and use that insight to fuel the next generation of therapeutic development. We’re building a global platform that combines clinical depth, molecular profiling, and computational power to turn unexplained survivorship into actionable science.

2. Cure51 focuses on decoding the biology of exceptional cancer survivors—an angle not widely explored in traditional oncology. What led you to this model, and what makes it so promising for therapeutic development?

Most drug discovery efforts start with disease models and work toward treatment. We start with the outcome: survival. By studying patients who have defied the odds, we can reverse-engineer what’s biologically different about them—whether it’s at the genomic, epigenetic, immune, or microenvironmental level.
This model gives us a unique vantage point. We’re not just looking for what causes cancer; we’re identifying what resolves it, or at least contains it long enough to radically extend life. These are not anomalies—they are clues. And when aggregated across enough patients, they become patterns that can guide truly differentiated drug targets.

3. The company has seen impressive momentum over the past year. Could you share some key milestones or inflection points that have defined Cure51’s growth to date?

It’s been an energizing year. We built a proprietary survivor identification pipeline across 79 hospitals across 29 countries, allowing us to scale patient recruitment and data collection at an unprecedented pace. We've now onboarded over 1020 patients in our database of exceptional survivors, with deep longitudinal clinical and molecular data.
We also expanded our scientific and clinical advisory boards with world-class oncologists, and brought on top-tier talent across data science, immunology, and translational medicine. Those people are foundational to the culture and trajectory we’re building.
And crucially, we’ve laid the technical groundwork to scale. The partnerships we’ve established, particularly on the computational side, are enabling us to accelerate hypothesis generation and validation cycles in ways that simply weren’t possible even two years ago.

4. You recently announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA to accelerate genomic data analysis. How will this collaboration enhance Cure51’s research capabilities, and what does it mean for the pace of discovery?

Partnering with NVIDIA allows us to dramatically increase both the speed and complexity of our analysis. We're working with vast, high-dimensional datasets—from single-cell RNA-seq to spatial transcriptomics to clinical imaging—and traditional methods just can't keep up with the scale or variability. To give you a sheer sense of scale, each patient generates one Terabyte of data!
By leveraging NVIDIA’s accelerated computing and AI frameworks, we can train models that identify survival-associated biological signatures more rapidly and accurately. This means faster iteration, more robust predictions, and ultimately a shorter path from signal to target. It's a multiplier effect on everything we do.

5. As we look to the future, what are the next major steps for Cure51—whether in clinical validation, partnerships, or broader platform scalability?

We're now moving from discovery to validation. Our focus is on translating our insights into therapeutic hypotheses that can be tested preclinically and clinically. We're already working on biomarker stratification and are building the infrastructure for prospective studies with partners.
Platform-wise, the idea is to expand into additional cancer types and geographies in the coming months. We see huge potential in building a globally integrated survivorship biobank—one that reflects genetic and environmental diversity. And as we do that, we’ll continue to scale our machine learning and molecular profiling efforts to match.

Long-term, our ambition is simple: to help shift oncology from managing cancer to overcoming it—starting with the people who already have.

As our motto says, CANCER DELENDA EST! Cancer is defeated!

https://www.cure51.com/

Nicolas Wolikow is a French entrepreneur and co-founder and CEO of Cure51. A graduate of Sciences Po and HEC, he began his career in a ministerial cabinet (Quai d'Orsay) and then within major French groups (L'Oréal, Sodexo) in marketing and international development roles (opening subsidiaries in emerging countries). He then shifted towards technology in the early 2000s, taking on the role of marketing director at Club Internet, before embarking on his first entrepreneurial venture in California as a co-founder of Talkway (the first startup to integrate video into emails). Upon returning to Europe, he co-founded Dailymotion before joining Meetic in 2006 as marketing director. He then entered the healthcare sector by joining the International SOS Group in 2008, where he successively served as CEO of the CIS region and then the Middle East & Africa. He co-founded and led Qare in 2016, which he left in 2020 upon its sale to join Ipsen as worldwide Chief Digital Officer. Since March 2022, Nicolas has been fully dedicated to Cure51.

Nicolas Wolikow is a seasoned entrepreneur and healthcare innovator, currently serving as the co-founder of Cure51, where he leads groundbreaking efforts to revolutionize cancer treatment through advanced tech and data-driven approaches. Previously, Nicolas was instrumental in the success of Qare, a leading telemedicine platform in France, where he drove growth and expanded access to digital healthcare solutions. With a strong background in both technology and healthcare, Nicolas is passionate about leveraging innovation to improve patient outcomes and drive transformative change in the medical field. His visionary leadership continues to push the boundaries of what's possible in healthcare.