QuantumPath in the application of quantum computing to personalized pharmacogenomics

Guido Peterssen, José Luis Hevia, Mario Piattini, members of aQuantum, and Dr. Adrián Llerena Ruíz, Pharmacology Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the UEx, Director of INUBE, and Dra. Eva M. Peñas Lledó, Full Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the UEx and coIP INUBE,  have coauthored the article entitled “QuantumPath® in the application of quantum computing to personalized pharmacogenomics”, published in The QPath® Blog.

The article is a broad summary of the results of the work carried out to date in the pharmacogenomic and quantum software tasks of the QHealth: Quantum pharmacogenomics applied to aging, structured in four sections:

• • QuantumPath® in the QHealth Project
  • The pharmacogenomic need for a quantum solution: the Q-PGx model
  • Specific QPath® contributions to the quantum tasks of the QHealth project
  • Summary of results

“QHealth: Quantum pharmacogenomics applied to aging” is the first major research project on quantum computing applied to life sciences to receive funding from the CDTI (Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial). The project was awarded in the call of the CDTI 2020 Missions Program, specifically in the Mission focused on: “Providing a sustainable response to diseases and needs arising from aging“, within the framework of the Spanish Business Leadership in R&D program. The project has been supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación  and by the FEDER (Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional).

In the scientific field, QHealth is a project at the global forefront of basic research in quantum pharmacogenomics that:

• • It addresses the hypothesis about the existence of a correlation among physiological and genetic limitations, consumption of prescribing drugs history, and the active principles an older adult has been exposed .
  • It focuses on the most relevant factors to avoid side effects and errors in drug prescription and medical treatments very frequent in the case of older adults.
  • Studies the creation of a methodological and technological environment that, according to the results obtained, will allow the development of future health software solution which use quantum computing for the optimization of the prescribing drugs administration.

The QHealth project is being carried out by a consortium of the companies aQuantum (alhambraIT), Gloin and Madrija and the collaboration of the Instituto Universitario Biosanitario de Investigación de Extremadura (INUBE) the Universidad de Extremadura (UEx) and the Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (UCLM). QHealth is a multi-year project (started in August 2020 and will end in December 2023), which has a total budget of 5,160,477.00 €, and received a grant from CDTI of 3,671,281.69 €.

The first section of the article presents a detailed summary of the project Consortium study that resulted in QPath being selected as the general-purpose quantum platform for the project, in which the following stand out:

• • It is 100% agnostic, which makes it possible to run the experiments in as many providers as supported by the platform.
  • It has no limit in the scaling required for the execution of the experiments.
  • Efficiently supports the two quantum technological approaches (gates and annealing).
  • It facilitates and provides real guarantees to make the practical projection of the research feasible.

In the second section, the authors address the tasks carried out to define a Q-PGx model (from Quantum Pharmacogenomics), that allows determining the factors related to pharmacogenetic variability and the interindividual difference in the response to drugs, for which they have defined a series of sets of variables determinants for the Q-PGx model.

In the third section, the authors present the most relevant results of the tasks carried out by aQuantum, INUBE and Grupo Alarcos (UCLM) in research for the application of quantum computing to personalized pharmacogenomics:

• • Specific quantum algorithms for personalized pharmacogenomics
  • Quantum Software Modernization
  • Quantum Software Testing
  • Quantum Software Quality
  • Research and adaptation of QPath® support modules and interfaces for healthcare software
  • Selection of the project’s quantum provider: Amazon Braket

Finally, the authors make a qualitative summary of the results achieved so far that, given its characteristics, it is best to read them in the full article, so that the contents remain in the context in which they have been presented.

The aQuantum Team congratulates Adrian, Guido, Pepe, and Mario for the publication of this article.

You can see all the articles and other papers published by aQuantum here.