New Study by Qulab Indicates Near-Term Quantum Computers Have Potential to Broadly Impact Areas Such as Drug Design and CRISPR Research

LOS ANGELES, July 17, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Qulab, a pharma-chemical company, today released the results of new research focused on molecular dynamics simulations and quantum computing technology.

The research is the first of its kind to propose that near-term quantum computers (~300 qubits) will be powerful enough to improve processes in areas such as computational drug discovery and CRISPR gene editing.

The Qulab study, titled "High-Quality Protein Force Fields with Noisy Quantum Processors," is available today as a preprint on arXiv.org. An accompanying blog post by Qulab founder and CEO Alireza Shabani was also published.

Anurag Mishra, a quantum computing scientist at Qulab and lead author of the paper, commented: "We propose that with only a few hundred qubits, a quantum computer can provide more accurate descriptions of small protein interactions and help improve the classical computational model of drug-protein interaction. We believe that QCs as small as the 300-qubit range can start making a difference to society in therapeutic areas such as drug discovery."

Albert Azout, partner at Cota Capital, an investor in Qulab, added: "Over the long term, quantum computing holds great promise in improving the accuracy and scale of numerical simulations used in chemistry and other sciences. The question is: can quantum processors have tangible benefits in the next three to five years? Based on Qulab's research, the answer is yes."

About Qulab 
Qulab's mission is to redesign R&D in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries by integrating advanced computing technology and automation into the discovery phase. Currently focusing on small molecule drugs, Qulab is harnessing computational chemistry, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing to automate molecule design. The company recently launched Quleap, the first integrated AI-based platform for small molecule drug design. Qulab is located in Los Angeles, California. For more info, visit http://www.qulab.com.

SOURCE Qulab