By Çağlar Bozkurt and Aniruddh Goteti, co-founders of Orbion
What if some of tomorrow’s most useful biological tools are hidden in proteins we have yet to understand?
Our Orbion-led Nebula consortium has been selected for SPRIND QuantumSense Exploration. With support from SPRIND, Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, we’re exploring how nature’s proteins could open new possibilities for biological research.
Some proteins connect light, magnetism and chemistry in remarkable ways. Under the right conditions, a magnetic field can change their fluorescence. Nebula is searching nature for more proteins with these properties—and exploring what they could make possible.
We bring computational discovery, quantum physics and experiments together to identify promising proteins and investigate their behaviour.
Our ambition is to turn these discoveries into programmable biological reagents, better assays and new research tools.
Imagine a fluorescent probe whose response to a magnetic field helps researchers distinguish its signal from the surrounding glow of a biological sample. That could offer a clearer view of the processes they want to study.
Finding the right proteins is the first step. Developing them into reliable tools is the work ahead.
We’re grateful to SPRIND for supporting this exploration. At Orbion, we believe that discovering new protein functions can expand what researchers are able to ask—and what biotechnology can build.
Nature may hold more of the ingredients for a quantum future than we realise. Nebula is our effort to find them.
