IonQ (IONQ.US), AstraZeneca (AZN.US), Nvidia (NVDA.US) and AWS demonstrate quantum-accelerated drug development workflows

The Zhitong Finance App learned that IonQ (IONQ.US) announced that its research project in collaboration with AstraZeneca (AZN.US), Amazon Web Services (AMZN.US), and Nvidia (NVDA.US) has achieved results, successfully developed and demonstrated a quantum accelerated computational chemistry workflow. According to IonQ, its design workflow shows a quantum-classical hybrid computing model, which can provide solutions to complex drug development problems, and is expected to improve the speed and efficiency of the drug development process.

The collaboration focuses on key steps in the Suzuki-Miyaura reaction (Suzuki-Miyaura reaction) — a type of chemical transformation reaction used to synthesize small molecule drugs. By integrating IonQ's Forte quantum processing unit (QPU) with the Nvidia CUDA-Q platform (accelerated by Amazon Brakeet service with NVIDIA H200 GPU) and AWS ParallelCluster service, the research team achieved an end-to-end resolution time increase of more than 20 times over the previous benchmark.

IonQ notes that the technology reduces the overall expected operating time from “months” to “days” while maintaining computational accuracy. Eric Kessler (Eric Kessler), general manager of the Braket business under Amazon AWS, said, “By combining quantum computers on Amazon Brakeet with AWS expandable GPU resources, we are helping AstraZeneca explore future application scenarios for quantum computers in accelerating computational chemistry research.”

IonQ emphasized that the results show that hybrid quantum computation can break through computational limitations in high-precision molecular modeling and support the analysis of more complex chemical systems.