Riverlane, Rigetti, and Astex Pharmaceuticals Partner to Explore Drug Discovery Applications

The three companies have been provided a grant from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to research possible applications of quantum computing in drug discovery. Riverlane will lead the 18 month program which will develop an integrated application for simulating molecular systems using Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services. As part of the research, the team will also develop error mitigation software to help optimize the performance of the hardware architecture to improve both error rates and run times. A paper that can provide some background into Riverlane's approach can be found here. Drug discovery remains one of the highest potential applications for quantum computing because pharmaceutical companies typically spend a billion dollars or more over a ten or more year period to develop a new drug. Although some companies are using various forms of classical computing to help perform computational chemistry simulations, the results are limited because the complexity of the calculations increase exponentially with the size of the molecule so the simulations will either take too long to complete or else require approximations which reduces the accuracy of the result. Additional information about this program can be found in a news release from Rigetti available here and another news release from Riverlane available here.

July 13, 2021