When Quantum Meets Pharma: Inside the Race to Design Drugs Atom by Atom

When Max Planck and Niels Bohr were discovering quantum mechanics over a hundred years ago in Berlin and Copenhagen, they probably never imagined their findings would radically reshape how new medicines are discovered and developed.

But their work provided a mathematical understanding of chemical bonds, reaction pathways, and the behavior of electrons in molecules, all of which are key aspects of pharmaceutical science.

Fast forward to 2026, and leading global pharma companies are exploring ways to apply quantum principles in real-world business settings. Labs around the world are developing quantum approaches to transform traditional processes around drug development and drug discovery.

Tom Mihaljevic, M.D., the Cleveland Clinic’s CEO, described the impact this way. “This technology holds tremendous promise in revolutionizing healthcare and expediting progress toward new cares, cures and solutions for patients. Quantum and other advanced computing technologies will help researchers tackle historic scientific bottlenecks and potentially find new treatments for patients with diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes.”

Today, pharmaceutical companies face a long, complex, and highly regulated process to develop drugs and establish safety and efficacy. It’s a process that can take, on average, more than 10 years and cost billions of dollars.

But quantum computers have the potential to change all that. Even with today’s noisy, intermediate-scale (NISQ) devices, pharma companies and their partners are developing quantum-enhanced approaches. As hardware scales and error correction improves, R&D timelines will shorten, costs will decrease, and the likelihood of identifying safe, effective medicines will increase. Plus, it will enable researchers to tackle problems that are essentially intractable today.

Classical + quantum

The actual implementation will be a hybrid model. Typical workflows will leverage established HPC infrastructure for bulk data management and processing and quantum processors (QPUs) for high-accuracy, quantum-mechanical molecular simulations. This hybrid approach, often orchestrated through platforms such as NVIDIA's CUDA-Q, enables quantum algorithms to solve complex, niche problems while significantly speeding up early-stage research.

Current studies have shown that these hybrid compute environments can match or modestly outperform purely classical baselines on specific benchmarks. Performance will certainly increase as quantum hardware improves.

Many real-world collaborations are already demonstrating the power of hybrid quantum-classical computing environments in pharma applications.

Here are a few examples in no particular order:

1. Biogen–Accenture–1QBit: Biogen worked with Accenture Labs and 1QBit to build a quantum‑enabled molecular comparison tool for early‑stage drug design, focused on complex neurological diseases.

2. IonQ–AstraZeneca–AWS–NVIDIA: Quantum‑accelerated catalytic route design - using IonQ’s Forte QPU, NVIDIA’s CUDA‑Q, and AWS (Braket + ParallelCluster) AstraZeneca achieved a 20× speedup in time‑to‑solution versus prior approaches, while maintaining high accuracy for key chemical pathways and activation energies.

3. Roche and Quantinuum entered into a multi‑year collaboration to apply next‑generation quantum algorithms for early‑stage drug discovery, including Alzheimer’s‑related targets.

4. Boehringer Ingelheim partnered with Google to apply quantum algorithms to simulate and analyze disease mechanism-related molecules

5. Pfizer is using quantum‑physics‑based AI (via XtalPi) to develop an enhanced platform to better understand their rapidly expanding small-molecule chemical space. The goal is to develop accurate predictive tools with significantly improved throughput.

6. IBM Quantum is collaborating with biotech firms such as Moderna and Algorithmiq to explore quantum-assisted molecular simulations, protein/RNA folding, and other complex tasks that strain classical computers

7. Merck Group is working with Amgen, Deloitte, and QuEra Computing to explore a novel approach—quantum reservoir computing (QRC)—to better handle small-data scenarios for molecular property prediction. This has broader applications, such as improving biomarker detection.

8. Cleveland Clinic uses IBM’s hybrid quantum–classical methods to run more accurate molecular energy calculations for drug‑relevant molecules.

9. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is using D‑Wave’s quantum‑hybrid solvers for sequence design, fragment linking, and other life‑science optimization tasks.

10. Algorithmiq has developed quantum algorithms specifically for life sciences and drug discovery, collaborating with IBM and other partners to apply quantum simulation to complex molecular problems.

Many quantum companies recognize the tremendous potential impact of this technology and are going to market with pharma-specific offerings, including:

• Quantinuum’s InQuanto is a proprietary state-of-the-art Python platform that leverages a range of quantum hardware to accelerate quantum computational chemistry research.

• QCWare’s Promethium provides an advanced molecular simulation platform that enables easier identification of target molecules, accelerating drug development and reducing costs.

• POLARISqb has been utilizing D-Wave’s quantum computer and AI to find optimized molecules, enabling the screening of large chemical libraries (10^30 possibilities) in days, hundreds of times faster than traditional methods.

• Qubit Pharmaceuticals and Aqemia represent a wave of quantum‑native or quantum‑enhanced drug discovery startups building platforms based on quantum chemistry and AI.

What disease will be relegated to history via quantum?

Applying quantum to pharma is still in the early stages. But what started as an abstract attempt to explain puzzling lab experiments a century ago has grown into a practical toolkit. Quantum is poised to significantly accelerate how the pharmaceutical industry designs and tests the next generation of medicines, making us healthier and safer in the future!

Thanks to Niels and Max.

NOTE: For deeper insight into who is leading the charge in quantum and pharma, check out The Quantum Insider and HorizonX Consulting’s Quantum Innovation Index – Life Sciences. The index ranks and rates over 30 life sciences organizations based on workforce capabilities, R&D investment, and strategic partnerships.