• Ecosystem Innovation: IonQ’s Life Sciences Application Workflow Accelerates the Drug Development Process Innovative Ecosystem Collaboration on a Commercially Relevant Use Case Quantum computing is moving rapidly from promise to practical impact, and our recent life sciences demonstration is a powerful example of IonQ’s dedication to bringing quantum to the real world. • In collaboration with AstraZeneca, AWS, and NVIDIA, we are now ready to share exciting results of the largest quantum-accelerated electronic structure simulation performed to date. • This groundbreaking demonstration incorporates state-of-the-art quantum chemistry techniques in an end-to-end, hybrid quantum- and GPU-accelerated workflow to model a critical step in a nickel-catalyzed synthetic chemical reaction, a key process relevant to drug development workflows used at AstraZeneca and across the pharmaceutical industry. • The collaboration integrated IonQ Forte on Amazon Braket, the NVIDIA CUDA-Q framework, and HPC-scale, GPU-accelerated classical postprocessing via AWS ParallelCluster to execute the chemistry simulation at least 20 times faster than our collaborators’ state-of-the-art estimates. • This innovative effort demonstrated how tightly-integrated hybrid quantum-classical workflows can potentially enhance accuracy and efficiency in computational chemistry while also improving the time-to-solution and cost-effectiveness of the workflow. • With continued advancements and a direct path to scale to hundreds of hi

Article Summaries:

  • IonQ announced a milestone in quantum‑accelerated drug development, showcasing the fastest quantum‑electronic‑structure simulation to date. In partnership with AstraZeneca, Amazon Web Services, and NVIDIA, the team ran a hybrid quantum‑classical workflow on IonQ’s trapped‑ion hardware via Amazon Braket, integrated with NVIDIA’s CUDA‑Q framework and GPU‑accelerated post‑processing on AWS ParallelCluster. The simulation modeled a nickel‑catalyzed reaction central to AstraZeneca’s synthesis pipeline and ran at least 20 × faster than the best classical estimates. The demonstration highlights how tightly coupled quantum‑classical pipelines can improve accuracy, speed, and cost‑effectiveness in computational chemistry, paving the way for scalable, industry‑ready quantum applications.

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