Drug discovery quantum computing project receives £6.85m grant

A consortium of quantum computing companies including Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) has secured a £6.85 million grant for a project that is looking to improve drug discovery in cancer.

The consortium is being led by SEEQC and will look to accelerate the use of quantum computing within pharmaceutical research to reduce the time required for drug development on a global scale. 

The grant was awarded via Innovate UK’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

Specifically, the project aims to develop simulation tools that support photodynamic therapies for cancer treatment. Today, useful simulations of photosensitising drugs are not possible with classical computing power alone. SEEQC’s project will develop an application-specific quantum computer designed to simulate the most classically challenging tasks within this research.

Quantum computing is a fundamentally different computing approach based on the laws of quantum mechanics, which allows certain computations to be performed far more quickly and efficiently than traditional computing does.

At present it is not possible to develop simulations for photosensitising drugs with traditional computing methods, however, a quantum computer can use the power of quantum mechanics to overcome this issue and make a leap forward for cancer treatment.

While classical machine-learning technologies are already starting to show great promise in reducing both time and cost of getting drugs to patients, quantum processing has the potential to disrupt pre-clinical drug discovery by supercharging the R&D process and making more accurate predictions as to the efficacy of therapeutics.

The ISCF QuPharma project will be led by SEEQC with the MDC working alongside the project partners including Riverlane, Oxford Instruments, the University of Oxford, and members from the Science and Technology Facilities Council, including the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre.

MDC, along with the team at the University of Oxford will be working with the drug discovery community to help build a more detailed understanding of where the bottlenecks, complexities, and challenges in the medicines discovery pipeline exist.

Dr Rafael Jiminez, head of Bioinformatics at MDC, said: “Quantum computing presents an exciting frontier for drug discovery and this project enables MDC as part of the Consortium led by SEEQC, working alongside our partners, to be at the very forefront of this innovative technology.

“This collaboration will unlock the ability to create ever more complex simulations, accelerating the process of research and development to a level never before possible, and could have a transformative impact on our ability to treat diseases like cancer.”

Matthew Hutchings, co-founder, and CPO of SEEQC, said: “Today, drug discovery is a labour and time-intensive iterative process with immense costs. Thanks to our world-leading partners and the invaluable commercial benchmarking by our end-customers at Merck, we have the opportunity to develop a quantum computing platform that can radically improve the efficiency of drug development”.