NEBULA Wins i-Lab 2025 — France’s Premier Deep-Tech Innovation Prize

NEBULA is proud to announce that it has been selected as a laureate of the i-Lab 2025 Concours d’Innovation, one of France’s most prestigious national awards recognizing the country’s most innovative and high-impact deep-tech projects. Operated under the France 2030 investment plan, the i-Lab prize distinguishes breakthrough ventures with strong potential to shape tomorrow’s industries.

A Generative AI Platform for Next-Generation Drug Discovery

NEBULA operates a patented generative AI platform, developed in-house, that reveals all conformations of therapeutic targets and accelerates the discovery of drug candidates with optimized profiles. The technology combines molecular biophysics-based modeling methods with artificial intelligence to comprehensively map all realistic conformational structures of any therapeutic target — without requiring prior data training.

This capability enables the identification of potential binding sites that are often cryptic and inaccessible by other methods. Exploiting such hidden sites opens the possibility of designing and developing drug candidates against targets previously considered “undruggable” due to insufficient structural data.

Today, more than 80% of disease-associated proteins in the human proteome are regarded as “undruggable” and remain unaddressed by the pharmaceutical industry. NEBULA aims to transform this landscape by unlocking new therapeutic avenues for these high-value targets.

The AFTERS Project: AI For Next Generation Drug Discovery

The project selected for the i-Lab 2025 competition is AFTERS (AI For nexT gEneration dRug diScovery). AFTERS aims to strengthen NEBULA’s platform through the development and validation of complementary technological building blocks designed to exploit the structural data of select oncogenic therapeutic targets. This project marks a significant step forward in translating NEBULA’s core capabilities into tangible drug discovery programs with real clinical potential.

Looking Ahead

With the i-Lab 2025 prize, NEBULA is now set to build a continuous discovery capability, bringing its AI-driven platform to bear on some of the most challenging problems in modern drug design. By targeting the vast space of undruggable proteins, NEBULA is positioning itself at the frontier of computational drug discovery — and the best is yet to come.