Cure51 Improves Cancer Survivors Genomic Research With NVIDIA Accelerated Computing

Paris, France – June 11th 2025 – Cure51, the Techbio company on a mission to decode the biology of exceptional cancer patients - the Outliers -  who survive aggressive cancers against all odds—today announces a successful benchmarking pilot performing genomic data analysis with NVIDIA accelerated computing, significantly reducing runtime and costs while enhancing scalability and throughput. 

Launched in late 2023, Cure51’s Rosalind Study is building the world’s largest database of super-responder patients in oncology. Working in collaboration with 100 cancer centers globally, including Charité (Berlin), Léon Bérard (Lyon), and Gustave Roussy (Paris), Cure51 is targeting Small Cell Lung Cancer, Glioblastoma, and Metastatic Pancreatic Cancer. Its goal is to understand why certain patients defy their prognosis and to harness those insights to develop new cancer therapies.

A core component of Cure51’s multi-omics pipeline is Whole Exome Sequencing (WES), where read alignment has consistently been a bottleneck, both in runtime and cost. In traditional CPU-based workflows, aligning a single sample could take up to 8 hours.

To address this, Cure51 tested NVIDIA Parabricks, a suite of GPU-accelerated tools specifically designed for genomics. Benchmarking results revealed up to 17x faster processing using NVIDIA H100 GPUs, and over 2x cost savings using NVIDIA L4 GPUs compared to their CPU (central processing unit) baseline.

“What we’ve found since we launched Cure51, is that there is no shortage of Outlier patients. What truly keeps us up at night is the speed at which we can process the data, so we can ultimately crack cancer and get to a viable cure. As we scale to process thousands of samples from cancer Outliers, optimizing speed and cost—without compromising quality—is critical to our mission,” said Simon Istolainen, co-Founder at Cure51. “NVIDIA Parabricks enables us to remove a major computational bottleneck and scale our platform with both speed and scientific integrity.”

By integrating GPU acceleration into their existing pipelines via Parabricks—without needing major architectural overhauls—Cure51 is now positioned to scale its data processing efforts across multiple sequencing technologies, including RNA, DNA, and proteomic data.

These improvements will directly enable Cure51’s scientific teams to iterate more quickly on hypothesis generation and therapeutic target discovery from cancer Outliers’ data—where time-to-insight can mean time-to-cure.

“This is more than a tech upgrade—it’s a paradigm shift in how we generate and process biological insight,” said Nicolas Wolikow, Co-Founder and CEO of Cure51. “Working with NVIDIA has exponentially increased our computational power in just a few months, meaning that Cure51 is now in a position to treat complex data at scale. By combining our unique data from long-term cancer survivors with cutting-edge NVIDIA infrastructure, we’re accelerating our ability to answer the biggest questions in oncology.”

“Cancer is inherently a disease of the genome,” said T.J. Chen, Head of Genomics Product at NVIDIA. “Parabricks reduces costs and time to process genomic data. As a result, Cure51 will be able to scale and apply precious research time, working with cancer survivors to find new cures.” 

This marks the beginning of broader GPU integration across Cure51’s research platform. 

“Leveraging NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI empowers our team to apply state-of-the-art deep learning and large language models for biomedical imaging and genomics, fully integrated in our use cases,” said El Mehdi Ouzgane, Late-Founder and COO of Cure51. 

Additional benchmarking is underway across other modules in the Parabricks toolkit to unlock further performance gains and cost efficiencies across the full genomics pipeline.

In March 2024, Cure51 raised €15 million in Seed funding led by Sofinnova Partners, Hitachi Ventures and LifeX. The company has also partnered with 10x Genomics to deploy Visium HD and Xenium precision technologies from October 2024. Cure51 is named after the British biochemist Rosalind Franklin, one of the greatest pioneers in medical research. Franklin and her doctoral student Ray Gosling captured the so-called ‘Photo 51’, which enabled the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953. The company’s motto is Cancer Delenda Est (Cancer is defeated).

About Cure51

Cure51 is a French bio-tech company founded by Nicolas Wolikow and Simon Istolainen alongside seasoned entrepreneurs and five world-renowned oncology centres: Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus (IGR, Paris - France), Leon Bérard Center (CLB, Lyon - France), Charité –Universitätsmedizin Berlin (Germany), and Vall d'Hebron (VHIO, Barcelona, Spain). The collaboration between the private and public sectors is at the core of the Cure51 project, led by a passionate team with expertise in computing, medicine, and biology, and partnered with principal investigators across its network of over 50 leading oncology centres worldwide. 

Cure51's exclusive data collection system, based on partnerships, enables the creation of a unique multimodal and multiomics database of Outliers. Using its discovery platform powered by computational modeling, Cure51 aims to understand the biological mechanisms responsible for this exceptional survival by identifying and validating targets that can act on these interactions, leading to first in class treatments. This research involves the use of all relevant models (in silico, in vitro, in vivo, ex vivo) and the integration of existing literature and available databases, along with the engagement of Cure51's KOL community. Ultimately, drug design will be subject to collaboration contracts with the industry. For further information please visit www.cure51.com.