Through funding made available by Innovate UK’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF), the Seeqc US-led consortium will build and deliver a full-stack quantum computer for pharmaceutical drug development.
Currently, supercomputers are used to predict and model the effect of drugs reducing the need for testing. But this is a very difficult task, even for the most powerful supercomputer. It’s estimated that more than half of the few drugs that enter the phase of human trials don’t get approval for commercial use, with all the effort going to waste.
The QuPharma project will enable the UK to build a commercially scalable application-specific quantum computer designed to tackle prohibitively high costs and dramatically reduce the time required for drug development on a global scale.
As devices are scaled up, NQCC will support the hardware testing and the integration of quantum resources into established classical infrastructure.
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