Quantum computers can measure a complicated computation in 200 seconds, which actually by the use of any world’s fastest supercomputer will take 10,000 years to produce a similar output – Google’s Quantum supremacy
It was only in movies or in fictional books have we come across, world affected by an apocalypse where there is a sudden outbreak of a disease, uncontrollable spread, several deaths and researchers are pressurized to find a cure fighting against time. But COVID-19 has put a same show for the world, and scientists have put their hopes on powerful supercomputers for speeding up the drug discovery.
Recently, Penn State University researchers have explored a way of quantum machine learning to discover possible COVID-19 treatments.
Quantum machine learning is a field that combines machine learning and quantum physics. It is believed to be faster and more economical than the existing methods for drug discovery.
“Discovering any new drug that can cure a disease is like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Swaroop Ghosh, researcher at Penn State University. According to him, it can take 5 to 10 years and can cost billions of dollars in using the existing drug-discovery pipeline.
Prof. Ghosh explained “High-performance computing such as supercomputers and artificial intelligence can help accelerate this process by screening billions of chemical compounds quickly to find relevant drug candidates”. He further adds,“This approach works when enough chemical compounds are available in the pipeline, but unfortunately this is not true for COVID-19. This project will explore quantum machine learning to unlock new capabilities in drug discovery by generating complex compounds quickly.”
Gosh and few engineering doctoral students from electrical engineering and computer science branches have earlier developed a toolset to solve combinatorial optimization problem, using quantum computing. And hence, their prior experience in this sector made it possible for them to pivot the same toolset to explore in the search for COVID-19 treatment.
Gosh feels, AI in drug discovery is a very new area. “The biggest challenge is finding an unknown solution to the problem by using technologies that are still evolving — that is, quantum computing and quantum machine learning. We are excited about the prospects of quantum computing in addressing a current critical issue and contributing our bit in resolving this grave challenge.”
It is in fact true that quantum computing has a great future. According to a new report from McKinsey & Partners, in partnership with the Viva Technology show, quantum computing technology will have a global market value of 1trillion dollars by 2035 and there could be 2000 and 5000 quantum computers worldwide by 2030.
