Establishing a quantum computing beachhead
Scientists around the globe are studying quantum computers looking for ways to harness this technology to make big gains in medicine.
IBM has created the IBM Quantum Network and is partnering with different organizations, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, to develop and test technology in various settings. One of these partnerships with the Cleveland Clinic is set to establish the “Discovery Accelerator,” focused on advancing health care through high-performance computing on the hybrid cloud, quantum computing technologies, and artificial intelligence.
Many people around the country are now using this technology on existing computers by tapping into the cloud, but with limited qubit access. IBM has researchers in places like Germany and Japan working on quantum computers and will be installing the country’s first of IBM’s next-generation 1,000+ qubit quantum systems on the Cleveland Clinic campus, which they are planning to use to help further investigate quantum computing’s many predicted benefits.
But what are those benefits?
Drug discovery and development
Quantum chemistry is one main area quantum computing is poised to help.
“The immediate application of that would be in drug discovery,” said Dr. Jehi. When scientists make drugs, they sit in a lab and develop different chemical formulas for what might constitute that drug.
“But for us to really know if it’s going to work, we need to be able to imagine how that chemical composition will translate into a structure,” she said.
Even in their most powerful form, today’s supercomputers are slow in their ability to change this chemical formula on paper to a simulation of what the chemical compound will look like. And in many cases, they can’t do this type of analysis.
“So, we end up making the drugs without knowing exactly how they’re going to look, which is not really the optimal way of creating a drug you expect to work” explained Dr. Jehi. “It’s a waste of time creating compounds that aren’t going to have any effect.”
Quantum computers will allow researchers to create and see these molecular structures and know how they bind and interact with the human body. In effect, they’ll know if a potential drug will work before ever having to physically make it.
Because of its differences from classic computing, quantum computers are not limited in their ability to simulate how different compounds can appear. Being able to simulate the compounds that drugs are made of can lead to a faster discovery of medications to treat a wide range of conditions.
Disease analysis
Eventually, this technology could assist with disease analysis, working on a molecular level to allow computers/AI to contemplate, for example, cancer molecules and gain a deeper understanding of how they function.
Dr. Jehi said quantum computing can also be used to study things like chronic illnesses. These are conditions that people must live with and manage, and how a person is feeling in this instance can vary day to day, based on things like what a person is eating, the weather, or medications they are taking.
“There are so many different possibilities for what could change a patient’s trajectory in one way versus another,” said Dr. Jehi.
She stressed that, if one has a group of patients, and everything that’s happened to them along their disease journey has been captured, it’s very challenging to mimic what that group looks like, and then study the effects of these different interventions on it using traditional computing.
“It just gets way too complicated, and the computers that we have can’t keep up with analyzing the effects of the different possibilities. It gets jumbled up,” Dr. Jehi said.
But quantum computing can offer quantum machine learning, meaning you use this special quantum ability to handle different simulations and different possibilities.
The Cleveland Clinic, for instance, is looking at how some patients who undergo general surgeries have heart complications after their procedures.
“It would be transformative if we could identify ahead of time who is at highest risk of having a heart attack after surgery, as so we could take care of those people better,” she said.
The clinic’s current data set includes records for 450,000 patients, and current AI/machine learning makes sifting through this very slow and complex. The clinic is using machine learning approaches to create a synthetic data set, a smaller group that is a replica of the much larger one. Quantum technology could improve and speed this analysis to produce models that better perform.