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The winner of the Q4Bio US$2 million prize used the IBM Quantum System One computer, which is housed in the Cleveland Clinic, to do simulations.Credit: Ryan Lavine for IBM

A team developing light-sensitive cancer drugs has won a US$2-million Quantum for Bio (Q4Bio) prize for demonstrating a potential use for quantum computers in health care. But no team was awarded the competition’s $5-million grand prize.

Prize organizers announced the winning team, made up of researchers from quantum software firm Algorithmiq, based in Helsinki, technology giant IBM and the Cleveland Clinic hospital in Ohio, on 16 April.

The winning group is working on improving a type of cancer drug that can be activated using light once it reaches a tumour, making it less toxic to the rest of the body than regular therapies are. The team members simulated the way one such drug molecule interacts with light. They eventually want to work out how tweaking the make-up of the active molecule in the drug affects its properties, with the hope of applying it to many cancer types.

Such complex simulations are too difficult for today’s quantum computers to perform. Instead, the team used a hybrid technique, with computational chemistry methods for parts of the simulation and regular computers to process inputs and outputs, says Sabrina Maniscalco, a quantum physicist and the chief executive and co-founder of Algorithmiq.

Hard problems

The hardest parts of the simulation — replicating the way photons interact with electrons in a molecule — were performed on a nascent quantum computer at the Cleveland Clinic, she says. “It’s exactly the type of problem quantum computers are good at simulating,” she adds.

These kinds of simulation can still be done using classical methods. However, the team won the US$2-million prize for demonstrating that the same algorithms, when run on more-capable quantum systems in the future, should be able to glean information about the molecules that would be impossible using classical simulations, Maniscalco says. The algorithms could also be applied to other molecular problems, such as the design of new antimicrobial drugs, she adds.

Quantum computers are already tackling problems in physics and chemistry, with some researchers claiming to have performed calculations that would be impossible on classical machines, a capability called ‘quantum advantage’. But applications in biology have remained elusive.

Although it was feasible for a team participating in the Q4Bio competition to achieve quantum advantage, that was not achieved — nor was it the explicit aim of the competition.

Instead, research teams were challenged to develop algorithms and ways of working so that applications in biology would be ready once the hardware is in place, says Jonathan Hirst, a computational chemist at the University of Nottingham, UK. Hirst co-leads one of the finalist projects, which aims to improve a drug to treat the genetic disorder myotonic dystrophy.

High bar

The contest opened in 2023 with the backing of US-based non-profit Wellcome Leap, a non-profit organization based in San Diego, California, that was set up by UK charity the Wellcome Trust.

When the competition started, “no one had taken the bold bet to connect” quantum computing and biology, says Shihan Sajeed, Q4Bio’s programme director. Dozens of entrants were whittled down to six in three stages, with finalists receiving up to $4.25 million in research funding across the duration of the 30-month challenge.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01236-x

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