Skip to main content

Pharmaceutical & Healthcare

Quantum computing accelerates drug discovery and biomedical research by solving molecular optimization problems that are computationally infeasible classically — protein folding, RNA structure prediction, and molecular screening.

Protein Folding

Predicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence is one of biology’s hardest problems. The folding path can be encoded as a QUBO and solved on Dynex to find low-energy conformations.

Quantum Protein Folding

Lattice protein folding via quantum annealing. Finds minimal-energy conformations for peptide chains on a 2D/3D lattice.
Scientific background: Irbäck et al. (2022). Folding lattice proteins with quantum annealing.

RNA Folding

RNA secondary structure prediction — finding the minimum free energy fold — maps naturally to a QUBO. This example folds the Tobacco Mild Green Mosaic Virus RNA sequence on Dynex.

Quantum RNA Folding

Minimum free energy RNA folding of the TMGMV sequence. Based on Fox et al., PLoS Comput Biol (2022).
Scientific background: Fox DM et al. RNA folding using quantum computers. PLoS Comput Biol. 2022;18(4):e1010032.

Molecule Screening

Virtual screening of phenol derivatives to identify candidates with desired physicochemical properties. Group contribution methods are combined with a QUBO formulation to efficiently explore large chemical spaces.

Efficient Exploration of Phenol Derivatives

QUBO-based molecular screening using group contribution approaches. Identifies optimal phenol derivative candidates for industrial applications.
Scientific background: Cho et al. Efficient Exploration of Phenol Derivatives Using QUBO Solvers. Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2024, 63(10), 4248–4256.

Enzyme Target Prediction

Quantum optimization applied to enzyme-target identification — a key step in drug discovery pipelines. Formulates the binding problem as a QUBO to identify enzyme targets efficiently.

Enzyme Target Prediction

QuTIE: Quantum optimization for Target Identification by Enzymes.
Scientific background: Ngo HM et al. QuTIE: Quantum optimization for Target Identification by Enzymes. Bioinformatics Advances, 2023.

Breast Cancer Prediction

Quantum feature selection for breast cancer classification using the Dynex scikit-learn plugin. Formulates mutual information-based feature selection as a QUBO problem.

Breast Cancer Prediction (scikit-learn Plugin)

Quantum feature selection applied to the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Dataset using the Dynex scikit-learn transformer.
Scientific background: Bhatia & Phillipson. Performance Analysis of SVM Implementations on the D-Wave Quantum Annealer. ICCS 2021.