Quantum Untangled: Healthcare and qubits
By creating treatments based on a real-time genomic analysis of patients, quantum machines could transform medicine.
Technology has gone hand-in-hand with medical care for thousands of years. Ever since stone age people turned to herbs to treat disease and ancient Egyptians used splints made of bark to set broken limbs, major technological developments have helped extend lifespans, cure previously untreatable disease and save lives that would otherwise have been lost.
Advances in the 21st century are on a slightly different scale, with the growth of AI and advanced compute power ushering in an era of personalised medicine, which quantum computers could accelerate.
During the current noisy and error-prone generation of quantum computing, the main focus is on how the technology might be used, rather than current use cases, building new algorithms and designing systems that could one day be deployed in the labs of pharmaceutical companies to discover new molecules for treatment.
Earlier this year IBM installed one of its System One quantum computers at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio for future medical research. At the time Cleveland Clinic CEO Tom Mihaljevic described quantum as holding “tremendous promise in revolutionising healthcare and expediting progress toward new cares, cures and solutions for patients.”
As well as using gate-based quantum hardware like IBM’s System One, researchers are working with present day tools like the annealing-based machines from D-Wave to investigate future potential. This is a quantum computing techniques to find the global minimum of a function. It iterates through different quantum states to solve any given problem, resulting in the state representing an optimal solution. One such approach was revealed last week by NTT Data, with the Japanese ITSP comparing quantum and non-quantum approaches to genome assembly in a simulation of a real-world environment.
Being able to identify genetic variations linked to certain illnesses in real time is seen as one future use case for quantum computing, one which could lead to custom and purpose-built treatment plans and medications.
In the full report on their findings, researchers for NTT DATA wrote: “The D-Wave hybrid solver and the classical Gurobi linear solver have shown the best performances in obtaining optimal solutions for all the proposed scenarios.“
David Montal, the company’s head of pharma and life sciences, and Jose Aznar, project lead and head of health innovation at NTT DATA said the project was designed to test the real-world use of quantum technology in the healthcare industry. “Although the use of quantum technologies is still in its early days, their applicability in the medium and long term will be decisive in fields such as genomics, digital image processing and real-time health data analytics where efficiency and processing capacity is key,” they wrote.
That could be a significant market. Research last month by ResearchAndMarkets found that the global quantum computing in healthcare market would reach $503m by 2028 from a base of $85m today. This is a CAGR of 42.5% and could be significantly higher if there is a breakthrough discovery using logical qubits as the machines become error free.
Last year the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical sector was the largest user of quantum computing in healthcare. This is because quantum, even at this noisy stage, is speeding up the R&D process for identifying potential drug targets and toxicity testing.
It is still early days for quantum in healthcare. As with other sectors, companies and research organisations are slowly testing the waters, building algorithms that might one day save lives. The real advantage will come with the true, error-free logical qubits predicted to emerge over the next decade. At that point calculations canl become more complex, the results more accurate and the output available much faster. This speed could lead to the real-time processing of a patient genome, analysis of symptoms and suggestion of new molecules to directly treat a problem. Drug creation could become as fast as a blood test is today.
Much like the early hunter-gatherers discovered useful herbs through trial and error, studies like those from NTT Data and the Cleveland Clinic are unlikely to all prove successful. But they are providing vital building blocks which could help quantum machines power the medical breakthroughs of tomorrow.
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