Drug maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is evaluating Quantum Computing for specific workloads that hit scalability and complexity walls with traditional architectures and approaches, specifically genetic algorithms.
Specifically, the company wanted to understand how quantum computing might give more comprehensive results with both quantum annealing (D-Wave) and standard gate model systems (IBM’s quantum simulator in this case).
The mRNA codon optimization problem is a good fit for quantum annealing because it is an NP-hard optimization problem—the very problem set D-Wave has often discussed when describing potential use cases. In this problem each amino acid in a protein sequence can be represented by as many as six codons, the goal is to find the right combination. (TheNextPlatform)
The paper can be read there.