On September 3, MaQuEst’s team presented at a BioValley France event dedicated to the health sector. Drawing on what has been tried and what has been learned, the talk offered a grounded perspective on where the quantum computing technology genuinely stands today and why starting to invest in quantum computing in healthcare is a reasonable choice, even before the technology has matured.
In health science, the impact of increasing computing power would be evident
Whether it’s calculating molecular properties, simulating protein folding, classifying medical images or diagnosing a tumor, further developments in a wide array of areas in healthcare depends on our ability to improve our computing capacities. This is why the question of how and in what aspects we could make a use of quantum computing is at the forefront of innovation in the health sector
No quantum advantage yet, and that’s not a bad sign
While some results achieved by quantum computing are comparable to classical high-performance computing (HPC), when comparing quantum computing’s results today to HPC, one needs to keep in mind that they are comparing one technology in its infancy to one that have already matured. There are still challenges that quantum needs to resolve before we can evaluate its potential with certainty.
The two main challenges we need to address, before we can expect a concrete quantum advantage, are :
- Hardware needs to find solutions to key issues: while impressive progress has been made the last few years, qubits are still too few and too error-prone to run, among other issues, the large precise calculations that drug discovery or genomics would require at scale.
- Algorithms are still being optimised: because there could be room for requiring less resources for a given problem or better translating a scientific question into something that can be run by quantum, algorithms are often refined into better version.
Where quantum computing points to in health sector
Despite these limits, the direction of interest in the health sector are already plenty. The areas being actively explored include:
- Drug discovery, exploring potential candidates and evaluating treatment efficiency
- Protein folding, predicting three-dimensional structure from a sequence
- Genomics, analyzing and interpreting genetic data at scale
- Feature extraction and classification, pulling meaningful signal out of complex biological data
- Medical imaging, including applications such as brain MRI analysis in oncology.
Across diagnostics, drug development and treatment design, problems that are structurally difficult for classical computing could benefit from a different computational approach and translate into better outcomes for patients.
Why now is a good time to start looking for ways to benefit from quantum computing?
Quantum applications have to be built up from small systems to larger ones. Learning and understanding how to apply it takes time in itself, and this needs to be worked on alongside the hardware development. Waiting until the hardware is mature before starting that work might delay the scaling and deploiement by a significant amount of time.
MaQuEst’s funding programme
This is exactly why MaQuEst is launching its call for project with the Region Grand Est. Designed to support companies exploring use cases or launching research, development or innovation projects in quantum or hybrid (HPC/quantum) computing, this call for project allows selected companies to candidate to a support from the Region Grand Est :
- Quantum diagnostic: identify and explore your use cases, with support of up to €15,000
- Quantum research, development, or innovation: develop an innovative use case, with support of up to €150,000