Quantum Pharma: Pioneering Quantum Computing in Genomics

Singapore may not be the first location that comes to mind when identifying quantum technology innovation hubs, but world-class infrastructure, a great scientific knowledge base and plenty of government support has attracted many leading quantum physicists to the steamy island metropolis.

Among them are Tommaso Demarie and Ewan Munro, co-founders of pioneering quantum computing start-up Entropica Labs, who met at Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies. With support, and pre-seed investment from London-based accelerator Entrepreneur First, Tommaso and Ewan have their sights set on transforming computational biology.

The two quantum physicists are passionate about the potential for quantum computing to be as transformational as classical computing has been, and they’re working hard to make sure that computational biology and genomics are amongst the first fields to benefit from quantum advantage.

As pharmaceutical companies focus on developing precision medicine, they are increasingly looking externally for innovation. Entropica Labs is ready to fill that need.

“After our academic work, we both wanted to contribute in a more practical way. We wanted to bridge the gap from the lab to the real world,” said Tommaso. 

“We see plenty of applications of quantum computing to molecular biology and genomics. The advantage that quantum computing could bring to genomics in the near term is in areas like optimization and probabilistic modelling for unsupervised and generative machine learning,” explains Ewan. “It’s not just the size of genomics data, it’s also the complexity. The patterns you are looking for can be very complicated, compared to some of the more mainstream use cases of machine learning.”

Quantum computing brings a completely new set of algorithmic tools to the table which could accelerate the development of precision medicine and ever quicker, more accurate drug discovery. Some of the “hard bottlenecks” that classical machine learning techniques face will be opened up.

“But of course, we still face challenges” says Tommaso. “What we are trying to achieve requires an interdisciplinary team. We need experts in quantum physics, computer science and biology! We are trying to build a unique team here.”

“There are technical challenges too,” explains Ewan. “The hardware is still fairly primitive. It makes it difficult to have a clear hypothesis of what exactly will happen when we scale beyond 100 qubits, especially with the noisy devices we will have for some years to come. The error rates are still quite high, which limits the number of quantum gates that you can perform. Optimizing to use as few operations as possible but still get the computation done is a challenge. Also, quantum algorithms can look fine on paper, but right now in implementing them we are essentially computing at a gate by gate level. We don’t yet have the luxury of high level tools that you have around classical computing, like compilers. We are talking about real frontier technology.”

Tommaso continues: “Because the field is so nascent, it’s really important to foster open and fruitful collaborations between hardware and software quantum companies. We have a partnership with Rigetti Computing, and we are very excited about their announcement of a 128 qubit processor based on superconducting qubits by late 2019. At the same time, we understand the importance of keeping on top of all the alternative processing technologies too. Our feeling is that it won’t be a win/lose competition, but rather that each architecture will find specific applications in the future quantum landscape. This belief suggests that, as a software company, we need to be hardware agnostic.”

In such an emerging field, it’s difficult to know who your competitors are and who you should collaborate with. “We are very open to engaging with fellow quantum computing companies, and we see this a lot in the community. It’s at such an early stage of development that we aren’t competing for customers yet. Also, at the moment, it’s as much about education as anything else. We need to educate investors, and the public about what quantum computing is, what it can do, and what it can’t do.”

The quantum computing industry is being built from the ground up by people like Tommaso and Ewan. Despite the many challenges in front of them, the potential impact will be truly transformational. Expect to hear a lot more about Entropica in the coming months.

For more information email me directly on amit.das@alphaevents.com

Visit the Entropica website at: https://www.entropicalabs.com/