IonQ has announced a multi-party collaboration with AstraZeneca, AWS, and NVIDIA to demonstrate a hybrid quantum-classical workflow aimed at accelerating early-stage pharmaceutical development. The workflow, showcased at ISC High Performance 2025, achieved a 20x speedup in time-to-solution compared to previous approaches while modeling catalytic steps in Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling—a reaction class essential to small-molecule drug synthesis.
The end-to-end solution integrates IonQ’s Forte quantum processing unit (QPU), NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q platform, and AWS cloud infrastructure, including Braket and ParallelCluster. This combination allowed accurate simulation of complex chemical pathways, significantly reducing the expected computational runtime from months to days. The result highlights how quantum acceleration can address existing bottlenecks in computational chemistry, with implications for route optimization and activation energy analysis in drug design.
This effort builds on IonQ’s recent focus on scaling practical hybrid quantum-classical workflows, following earlier demonstrations in materials science and machine learning. With enterprise-grade hardware and access through major cloud providers, IonQ positions this collaboration as an early proof point for quantum-enhanced capabilities in life sciences R&D. The demonstration also reinforces the growing momentum behind ecosystem-level quantum deployments across industry and HPC.
Read the full announcement from IonQ here.
June 9, 2025
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