When laser light is shone on a patient's body, an anticancer drug targets and destroys only cancer cells. It is like a bomber dropping bombs and designating the target with a laser. Wellcome Leap in the United States said on the 16th (local time), "A joint team from the Finnish quantum software company Algorithmog, IBM in the United States, and Cleveland Clinic won the Q4Bio competition with research on developing a photosensitive anticancer drug."
Wellcome Leap is a nonprofit research foundation established in San Diego by the United Kingdom's Wellcome Trust. Launched in 2023, Q4Bio is a research competition that uses quantum computers in life science and medical research, aiming to develop quantum algorithms for biological research that can run on commercial quantum computers expected in 3 to 5 years. An algorithm is the procedure or method by which hardware, namely a computer, solves a problem. The program that implements this as code is software.
◇ Simulation of the process that kills cancer cells when exposed to light
The Algorithmog consortium team used IBM's quantum computer to simulate the core mechanism of a photosensitive anticancer drug. The principle is as follows. An anticancer drug that responds sensitively to light is injected into the body so it can seek out cancer cells. Then, when a laser is shone on the affected area from outside, the drug generates reactive oxygen species that selectively kill cancer cells. The team simulated the process by which a single drug molecule interacts with photons, which are particles of light.
Of course, not every step was done on a quantum computer. There is not yet a quantum computer capable of that. Some simulations were done on conventional computers. Sabrina Maniscalco, head of Algorithmog, said, "By running the same algorithm on more powerful quantum systems, we have demonstrated that it is possible to derive molecular information that classical simulations cannot," and added, "This algorithm can also be applied to other molecular problems, such as designing new antimicrobials."
Quantum computers and artificial intelligence (AI) have emerged as technologies that can change the paradigm of drug development. Developing a single new drug takes more than 10 years and costs trillions of won, but the success rate is under 10%. According to the latest report from the Biological Research Information Center (BRIC), AI has already shortened the average drug development period by 40% to 60% and reduced expense by up to 70%. That is because every pathway by which a drug interacts with the human body can be simulated on a computer.
Quantum computers can currently accelerate drug development far more than AI. Han Namsik, a professor in the Department of Quantum Information Science at Yonsei University, explained, "Conventional AI explores only one pathway at a time, but quantum algorithms, thanks to quantum properties, can simulate multiple pathways simultaneously, like 'SONOKONG's bunshin technique.'"
◇ Solving in 200 seconds a problem that would take 10,000 years
Quantum computers are often called "dream computers" that can calculate 10 million times faster than supercomputers. Computers using AI today represent the absence or presence of electrons as 0 and 1, that is, in bits. By contrast, the unit of a quantum computer is the Qubit, in which the 0 and 1 states are superposed. If a classical computer has 2 bits, it can be one of four states—00, 01, 10, 11—but 2 Qubits can be all four at once. If there are 300 Qubits, 2 to the 300th power states are possible—more than the number of atoms in the universe—dramatically increasing computing power.
In October 2019, Google's Quantum AI team led by John Martinis of UC Santa Barbara, who won last year's Nobel Prize in physics, reported in the journal Nature that it solved a random number verification problem in 200 seconds on a quantum computer that would take the best existing supercomputer 10,000 years. It was the first achievement of so‑called "Quantum Supremacy," where a quantum computer surpasses a supercomputer. The team used the Sycamore quantum chip with 53 Qubits.
The Algorithmog team developed the algorithm with quantum computers in mind that could be commercialized in as little as three years. For the $2 million (2.9 billion won) prize criteria, the organizers proposed circuit depth corresponding to more than 50 Qubits and 1,000 to 10,000 operation steps. Depending on the principle used to realize quantum states, there are slight differences, but calculations can be done in milliseconds (one‑thousandth of a second) to a few seconds.
Quantum computers currently under development operate on different principles. The most representative approaches are superconducting circuits and ion traps. Google and IBM implemented Qubits in a superconducting state where electrical resistance disappears at ultralow temperatures. Of the six teams that reached the finals of this competition, five, including Algorithmog, used IBM's quantum computer.
An ion trap expresses Qubits by confining ions—atoms with positive or negative charge—in a superposed state of two levels. IonQ, founded by Kim Jeongsang of Duke University, simulated in June last year how amino acid chains fold to form the three‑dimensional structure of proteins using an ion trap quantum computer with 36 Qubits.
◇ Hopes for use in genome decoding
AI has been actively used in drug development since 2017. According to U.S. AI consulting firm Intuition Lab, there are more than 173 AI drug programs in clinical development, and 15 to 20 programs are expected to enter phase 3 clinical trials this year alone. As quantum computers advance, AI's drug development speed could increase further. In particular, personalized therapeutics based on patients' unique genetic information can be developed.
The genome, which contains human genetic information, consists of about 3.2 billion base pairs. Living organisms connect amino acids according to the order of bases to create proteins that govern all life processes. If human base information is converted into digital information, it becomes 6.4 billion bits or 750 megabytes. At that scale, everything can be stored with just 33 Qubits. Even storing all of humanity's genetic information would require fewer than 100 Qubits.
Researchers at the United Kingdom's Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Oxford said on the 9th that they had, for the first time in the world, loaded the full genomic information of the hepatitis D virus onto a quantum computer. They also reached the finals of the Q4Bio competition with this research. The team loaded information on about 1,700 bases that make up the hepatitis D viral genome onto IBM's quantum computer. They converted an entire specific organism's genome into a format that a quantum computer can process.
However, challenges remain before commercialization. The error problem of quantum computers must be solved to use them for genome analysis directly linked to life. There is also the hurdle of competing in efficiency with highly optimized classical computing algorithms. This Q4Bio competition demonstrated through simulations that quantum computers are effective in solving difficult problems in medicine and life sciences. The quantum era of bio is drawing near.
References
Q4Bio (2026), https://wellcomeleap.org/q4bio_prize_announcement/
Wellcome Sanger Institute (2026), https://www.sanger.ac.uk/news_item/genome-loaded-onto-a-quantum-computer-in-world-first/
arXiv (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.07866
Nature (2019), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1666-5