Allie Nawrat talks to the Pistoia Alliance, QED-C and QuPharm about the opportunities Quantum Computing may provide to the pharma industry.
In a future-casting 2030 vision report, life sciences membership organisation Pistoia Alliance examined technological opportunities that might impact the pharma industry’s efficiency, and Quantum Computing was clearly identified.
To support this initiative, Wise explains, Pistoia teamed up with Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), which was created in 2018 by the US Government as part of the National Quantum Initiative, and QuPharm, a pre-competitive collaboration of pharma companies interested in identifying use cases for quantum computing in the life science field.
Some excerpts of this paper:
The poll (pharma executives) found that 82% believed quantum computing would impact the industry in the next decade. Also, almost a third of respondents planned to start evaluating quantum computing in the next year; while 33% had quantum computing on their radar and were keen to evaluate in the near future.
The primary use is expected to involve accelerating the discovery, as well as research and development (R&D), of new drugs. Pistoia Alliance’s survey found that 82% of participants thought drug discovery and development would be the first to benefit from computing advancements.
The ability to improve and accelerate drug discovery through quantum computing has the potential to drastically cut the often prohibitively high costs of bringing a drug to market, as well as reduce time to market. It is currently estimated to take an average of ten years and $2bn to discover, develop and commercialise a therapy.