Cleveland Clinic-IBM Project Hopes to Provide a Quantum Leap in Speeding Research

Cleveland Clinic-IBM Project Hopes to Provide a Quantum Leap in Speeding Research. A quantum computer.

The current pace it takes for lab research ideas to become market-available therapies is unacceptably slow, many experts believe. Shortening this time will be essential to accelerating future health care solutions. A partnership between Cleveland Clinic and IBM aims to address this issue with what they say is the first private-sector, health care quantum computer in the U.S.

The computer, slated for completion in 2023 and called IBM Quantum System One, will be pivotal in the two organizations’10-year partnership to speed biomedical research. The installation is part of the Cleveland Clinic-IBM Discovery Accelerator, announced in 2021, which plans to marry Cleveland Clinic’s medical expertise with IBM’s technology and quantum computing know-how.

The Discovery Accelerator draws upon IBM’s latest advancements in high-performance computing, including:

  • Generative Toolkit for Scientific Discovery and other generative model capabilities that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to infer knowledge gaps and generate hypotheses to accelerate the research process in therapeutics and biomarker discovery.
  • RXN, a cloud platform that combines AI models and the ability to directly control robotic labs to enable end-to-end design and synthesis of new chemical compounds.
  • Deep Search, a next-generation tool for generating insight from large amounts of structured and unstructured technical literature.
  • High-performance hybrid computing technologies that enable researchers to send their workloads into the cloud and access the resources they need at scale.

When applied to health care areas such as pharmaceuticals, quantum computing also makes it possible to perform hundreds of millions of comparisons of complex molecules simultaneously. Molecular matches are examined, allowing for both positive and negative effects of new therapeutic approaches to be predicted. The implementation of quantum computing could enable a significant range of disruptive use cases for providers and health plans by accelerating diagnoses, personalizing medicine and improving pricing.

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