CQT and Qubit Pharmaceuticals Partner to Advance Quantum Drug Discovery

The Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) in Singapore and Qubit Pharmaceuticals have launched a two-year strategic research collaboration to develop and implement quantum algorithms for molecular discovery. The partnership aims to address critical computational bottlenecks in drug discovery—such as the accurate prediction of drug properties and efficient molecular sampling—by combining Qubit Pharmaceuticals’ expertise in quantum chemistry with CQT’s capabilities in circuit design and hardware implementation.

A primary technical milestone of the collaboration is the first-ever experimental realization of a quantum Markov Chain Monte Carlo (qMCMC) algorithm on physical quantum hardware. While classical drug discovery often relies on Markov chains to sample probability distributions for molecular simulations, quantum versions of these algorithms offer potential quadratic speedups. The team successfully deployed the qMCMC algorithm using Quantinuum’s H2 and Helios trapped-ion systems via Singapore’s National Quantum Computing Hub. The results, which demonstrate the feasibility of running accurate sampling tasks on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices, have been published to the physics preprint server arXiv (arXiv:2603.08395).

In addition to sampling, the researchers are designing and testing other advanced methods, including variational quantum eigensolvers (VQE) and quantum phase estimation (QPE). The collaboration, led by Sergi Ramos-Calderer (CQT) and Jean-Philip Piquemal (Qubit Pharmaceuticals), focuses on moving beyond abstract benchmarks to produce real molecular simulation data. By modeling chemistry with higher fidelity on gate-based quantum machines, the partners intend to integrate quantum-enhanced capabilities directly into pharmaceutical research workflows to improve early-stage decision-making in the drug development pipeline.

You can find the official announcement from the Centre for Quantum Technologies here and the technical study regarding the qMCMC realization on arXiv here.

May 2, 2026