Qubit Pharmaceuticals announces strategic collaboration with Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies to advance quantum algorithms for drug discovery
National University of Singapore
image:
Collaborators from Qubit Pharmaceuticals and the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) met at the Quantum Industry Day in Singapore on 23 April 2026. Pictured from left: José Ignacio Latorre, CQT; Baptiste Claudon, Qubit Pharmaceuticals; Robert Marino, Qubit Pharmaceuticals; Sergi Ramos-Calderer, CQT.
view moreCredit: Image credit: Centre for Quantum Technologies, Singapore
Paris / Singapore — 30 April 2026 — Qubit Pharmaceuticals today announced a strategic research collaboration with the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) in Singapore to develop and use novel quantum algorithms for molecular discovery.
The two-year collaboration combines Qubit Pharmaceuticals’ expertise in quantum chemistry and sampling techniques with CQT’s deep capabilities in quantum computing, circuit design, and experimental implementation. The goal is to bring advanced quantum chemistry methods closer to real-world drug discovery applications.
Together, the teams are designing and testing algorithms for quantum chemistry, including variational quantum eigensolvers, quantum phase estimation, and quantum Markov Chain Monte Carlo (qMCMC) sampling. These algorithms target key computational bottlenecks in drug discovery, such as improving the accuracy of quantum chemistry calculations for better drug property predictions and enabling more efficient sampling techniques for molecular simulations.
“Quantum algorithms for chemistry have been studied for decades, but real implementations remain rare,” said Robert Marino, CEO of Qubit Pharmaceuticals. “By working with CQT and leveraging access to state-of-the-art quantum hardware, we aim to transition these algorithms from theoretical constructs into real computational tools for molecular discovery.”
“Recent progress in quantum hardware is exciting. We want to match this pace in developing quantum algorithms. We are glad to partner with domain experts like Qubit Pharmaceuticals to show what quantum computers can do for problems people care about,” said José Ignacio Latorre, Director of CQT and Provost’s Chair Professor at the National University of Singapore’s Department of Physics.
The researchers aim to explore whether quantum algorithms can approach the highest level of accuracy in molecular simulations while potentially delivering quadratic or even exponential computational advantages compared to classical approaches. They will validate their algorithms on quantum simulators before deploying to real quantum hardware.
The project is supported by Singapore’s National Quantum Computing Hub, through which CQT researchers have access to run experiments on Quantinuum’s quantum systems, including the H2 and Helios systems.
Marino and Baptiste Claudon presented first results from these experiments on 23 April at a Quantum Industry Day in Singapore organised by Quantinuum and Singapore’s National Quantum Office for some 250 invited participants.
The team has implemented the qMCMC algorithm, testing several different encodings. This is the first time this type of algorithm has been deployed to quantum hardware, and the team has published details to the physics preprint server arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08395).
The collaboration is led by Jean-Philip Piquemal at Qubit Pharmaceuticals and Sergi Ramos-Calderer at CQT, with an initial team of four researchers across both organisations. Additional researchers are expected to join as the programme expands.
"Through our collaboration with Quantinuum, we have the opportunity to test quantum algorithms on some of the best gate-based quantum machines available today,” said Ramos-Calderer. “Algorithm design must move hand-in-hand with hardware improvements, and this work is a meaningful step in this direction."
“Drug discovery is fundamentally a molecular simulation challenge. If we can model chemistry with greater fidelity and efficiency, we can make better decisions earlier in the pipeline,” said Piquemal, Chief Scientific Officer / Co-founder, Qubit Pharmaceuticals. “This collaboration allows us to rigorously test whether quantum algorithms can move from scientific promise to practical utility on problems that matter.”
“We are interested in more than benchmark circuits or abstract demonstrations,” said Claudon, Quantum Physics Engineer, Qubit Pharmaceuticals. “Our focus is implementing algorithms that can address real computational bottlenecks in chemistry. Working with CQT and Quantinuum hardware gives us an opportunity to evaluate these methods under realistic conditions and learn what is required to make them useful for molecular discovery.”
Over the longer term, the team aims to generate real molecular simulation data produced directly by quantum algorithms and integrate these capabilities into future drug discovery workflows.
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Media contacts
Chris Spillane
Qubit Pharmaceuticals
Jenny Hogan
Centre for Quantum Technologies
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About Qubit Pharmaceuticals
Qubit Pharmaceuticals was founded in 2020 with the vision of co-developing, in partnership with pharmaceutical and biotech companies, safer and more effective new drugs. The company emerged from the academic research of five internationally renowned scientists: Louis Lagardère (Sorbonne University and CNRS), Matthieu Montes (CNAM), Jean-Philip Piquemal (Sorbonne University and CNRS), Jay Ponder (Washington University in St. Louis), and Pengyu Ren (University of Texas at Austin). Qubit Pharmaceuticals leverages its Atlas platform to discover new drugs through molecular simulation and modeling, accelerated by hybrid HPC and quantum computing.
The company’s multidisciplinary team, led by CEO Robert Marino, and its founders are based in France at the Paris Santé Cochin incubator, and in Boston, USA.
Qubit Pharmaceuticals was named a "2024 Technology Pioneer" by the World Economic Forum and has forged high-level partnerships, including with Institut Curie, Sorbonne University, and the Institute of Pharmacology at the University of Sherbrooke (Canada).
For further information, including the drug discovery portfolio, visit www.qubit-pharmaceuticals.com
About the Centre for Quantum Technologies, Singapore
The Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) is Singapore’s flagship national research centre in quantum technologies. Supported under Singapore’s National Quantum Strategy, the centre has nodes at partner institutions and coordinates research talent across the country. CQT’s partner institutions are universities – the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and the Singapore University of Technology and Design – and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research.
CQT brings together physicists, computer scientists and engineers to do basic research on quantum physics and to build devices based on quantum phenomena. Experts in this new discipline of quantum technologies are applying their discoveries in computing, communications, and sensing.
For more information, please visit www.cqt.sg
About National University of Singapore (NUS)
The National University of Singapore (NUS) is Singapore’s flagship university, which offers a global approach to education, research and entrepreneurship, with a focus on Asian perspectives and expertise. We have 15 colleges, faculties and schools across three campuses in Singapore, with more than 40,000 students from 100 countries enriching our vibrant and diverse campus community. We have also established more than 20 NUS Overseas Colleges entrepreneurial hubs around the world.
Our multidisciplinary and real-world approach to education, research and entrepreneurship enables us to work closely with industry, governments and academia to address crucial and complex issues relevant to Asia and the world. Researchers in our faculties, research centres of excellence, corporate labs and more than 30 university-level research institutes focus on themes that include energy; environmental and urban sustainability; treatment and prevention of diseases; active ageing; advanced materials; risk management and resilience of financial systems; Asian studies; and Smart Nation capabilities such as artificial intelligence, data science, operations research and cybersecurity.
For more information on NUS, please visit nus.edu.sg.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum is a leading quantum computing company offering a full-stack platform designed to make quantum computing deployable in real-world environments. The company has commercially deployed multiple generations of quantum systems built on the well-established QCCD architecture, which it has implemented with novel designs and capabilities to achieve the industry’s highest accuracy levels based on average two-qubit gate fidelity.* Quantinuum has active engagements with market leaders across pharmaceuticals, material science, financial services, and government and industrial markets. The company has a global workforce of approximately 700 employees, including top scientists and researchers. Over 70% of its technology team hold PhDs. Quantinuum’s headquarters is in Broomfield, Colorado, with additional facilities across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Singapore.
For more information, please visit www.quantinuum.com.
* As of December 31, 2025.
Method of Research
News article
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Longstanding quantum communication barrier broken
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Description of the light wavelengths and the location of the new, coherent quantum dots in the telecom band
view moreCredit: Marcus Albrechtsen, NBI
Quantum internet
Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have broken a long standing barrier by managing to send single photons - that can’t be copied or split and thus are secure - in the network of optical fibers we already have. This opens up a broad range of applications relying on secure Quantum information.
Signal loss in optical fibers
Quantum dots are unsurpassed in their ability to generate coherent single photons - single particles of light, which cannot be split or copied and therefore are secure for quantum communication. So far, the problem was that the best quantum dots only worked around 930 nm wavelengths, which is far short of the telecommunication compatible wavelengths starting at 1260 nm. Only these longer wavelengths can be used to distribute the information-carrying photons far and has so far been restricted to sub-optimal platforms.
Now, scientists have managed to create a new type of quantum dot, which exploits the best of both worlds.
Noise is the enemy of everything quantum
Researchers working with quantum light sources have long attempted to work directly in the telecom band, but the photons produced at these wavelengths were always very noisy, as Leonardo Midolo explains. “Noisy in this context means that you couldn’t generate one photon after another with the same properties. The photons need to be perfectly identical, and achieving this level of quantum coherence in the telecom band has proven extremely challenging”.
Two major challenges overcome
Leonardo Midolo and his team have succeeded in overcoming two major challenges in one go: their photons are now coherent and identical, and they are emitted directly in the original telecom band (around 1300 nm), the same wavelength used in today’s standard fiber-optic networks. This opens the door to linking photonic quantum technologies to the existing communication infrastructure.
For years, a kind of “accepted truth” circulated within the research community: yes, you can make photons in the telecom band, but they will be noisy and incoherent – which, as Leonardo notes, essentially meant “useless” for quantum applications. Their breakthrough challenges that assumption head-on.
This progress relies strongly on collaboration with the research group in Bochum, Germany, who optimized the growth of these ultra-low-noise quantum dot emitters.
“At the Niels Bohr Institute, we then use advanced nanofabrication in our cleanroom to pattern these materials into quantum photonic circuits,” adds Marcus Albrechtsen, joint first author of the study. “We fabricate nanochips and probe them with lasers at low temperatures to confirm they emit highly coherent single photons.”
Extras for free
Just as important – a kind of icing on the cake - is the fact that photonic integrated circuits, chip-scale optical circuits that miniaturize complex optical setups, are commonly made in silicon. It is the most common, cost-effective material for controlling and routing light on a chip. However, silicon absorbs much of the light in wavelengths below 1100 nanometers, which has so-far precluded the integration of near-infrared emitters like quantum dots in these photonic chips. This means that if you can make your photons coherent, identical, and operate at 1300 nm you can directly embed quantum-grade light sources with commercial silicon photonic chips.
What happens now?
This achievement effectively removes one of the biggest roadblocks to build real, large‑scale quantum networks. It means quantum chips, quantum repeaters, and long‑distance quantum communication can now be built on top of the world’s existing fiber infrastructure. No complicated workarounds like nonlinear frequency conversion. Just plug‑and‑play quantum technology. In short: the door to a functional quantum internet is now officially open. And with this platform in hand, the race is on to build the first scalable quantum network.
Factbox: Quantum dots
A quantum dot is a collection of atoms, roughly 30,000 in these devices, that are different from their surroundings – so they behave like an artificial atom itself.
The individual dot is about 5,2 nm tall and 20 nm wide. They work as emitters for single photons in this way: The material boundaries of the Quantum dot locally form discrete energy levels like a real atom - discrete as in quantized and therefore "quantum" in nature.
This means that when a laser pulse/beam with many photons hits the quantum dot it gets excited, an electron is locally trapped in the dot and after a short time it decays and emits a single photon. Not two or a decimal amount but exactly one photon.
This single photon can be used for quantum computation or secure communication since information stored in a single photon cannot be copied.
Journal
Nature Nanotechnology
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
A quantum-coherent photon–emitter interface in the original telecom band
Cal Poly research shows time-varying magnetic fields can engineer exotic quantum matter
Quantum technology has promising potential to revolutionize how large and complex amounts of information are processed. While already in use primarily in laboratory and research settings globally, quantum technologies are in a transition phase for broader industry applications across many economic sectors.
In researching fundamental aspects of quantum physics, or the behavior of nature at the smallest scales — involving atoms, electrons and photons — a study led by Cal Poly Physics Department Lecturer Ian Powell analyzed how a changing magnetic field can make matter behave in unusual ways.
Powell and student researcher Louis Buchalter, who graduated with a Cal Poly bachelor's degree in physics in 2025, published the article “Flux-Switching Floquet Engineering” in the journal Physical Review B, highlighting how changing magnetic fields over time in time can create quantum states that do not exist in any stationary material (remaining in the same state as time elapses).
“On a big-picture level, I would describe this as an advance in our understanding of how time-dependent control can create and organize new forms of quantum matter,” Powell said. “The central idea is that useful quantum properties can depend not just on what a material is, but on how it is driven in time. In our case, we show that periodically changing a magnetic field can produce driven quantum phases with no static counterpart.”
By engineering new quantum behaviors by timing the field, physicists can potentially create technologies that are very stable and hard to disrupt by “noise” or imperfections that can interfere with quantum technology functionality and avoid system errors.
Admittedly, Powell said that it’s difficult to describe the technical aspects of the study to non-physicists. But conceptually, research points to possible routes for engineering these kinds of exotic driven quantum states in controlled platforms such as ultracold-atom experiments.
“The most direct industry relevance of our study is to quantum computing and quantum simulation, rather than to a specific end-use sector at this stage,” Powell said. “Any eventual impact on areas like pharmaceuticals, finance, manufacturing or aerospace would likely be indirect, by contributing to the longer-term development of better quantum technologies. To move toward industry use, the next steps would be experimental validation and further work connecting these ideas to realistic quantum-device platforms.”
Applying principles of physics, the work also revealed a mathematical organizing rule that echoes patterns more commonly associated with higher-dimensional quantum systems, suggesting that relatively simple driven systems may offer a new way to study that kind of physics.
The research shows that the exotic driven phases can appear, but also uncovers a precise organizing rule for the topological phase diagram of the system, or a visual map that delineates distinct, stable quantum phases of matter based on unchanging topological numbers.
The use of physics principles in quantum mechanics leverages the ability of a computational system to process information more quickly, run massive simulations, and comprehensively analyze far more data than classical computing.
Magnetic fields are one of the main tools used to control and read out quantum bits (or qubits), the fundamental unit of information used in quantum technology. Qubits are comparable to the units of 0s and 1s in classicalcomputing (applied in commonplace computing currently) used to represent physical electrical states.
As a student researcher working alongside Powell, Buchalter said that co-authoring the article taught him “a lot about the process of conducting research and how new research findings are effectively communicated with the broader scientific community.”
“I learned that research is rarely a straightforward process, often requiring persistence and creative problem solving during the course of a research project,” Buchalter said. “I believe our results help demonstrate the power of Floquet engineering for realizing quantum systems with highly-tunable properties, paving the way for further research into periodically driven quantum matter and the development of its applications.”
Buchalter plans to pursue a Master of Science degree in materials science and engineering at the University of Washington in the fall, and to conduct experimental research on quantum matter. He’s considering pursuing a career at a national lab on the development of quantum devices after finishing his education.
“I initially took on the project due to my interest in condensed matter physics, however, I became fascinated with the field of quantum materials through my experience,” Buchalter said. “I am very interested in continuing to study quantum matter and helping develop its applications in electronic and photonic devices.”
Journal
Physical Review B
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Flux-Switching Floquet Engineering
Article Publication Date
1-May-2026
