Biological quantum

Human health quantum computing milestone achieved by Infleqtion, a global quantum technology pioneer. The company reported that its quantum software team and excellent UChicago and MIT collaborators advanced to Phase 3 of the Wellcome Leap Quantum for Bio (Q4Bio) Challenge. This global program aims to accelerate quantum-enabled medical solutions in five years.

Moving from Simulation to Reality

The project's trajectory shifts from controlled simulations to real quantum processors in Phase 3. This step evaluates whether quantum techniques can outperform classical technologies on real-world cancer data.

Infleqtion's Chief Technology Officer, Pranav Gokhale, stressed that this advancement allowed the team to test quantum-enabled biomarker discovery end-to-end. Instead of using theoretical models, the team is analyzing performance on current quantum hardware to see if these methods might enhance clinical feature selection.

Addressing Cancer Data Complexity

Identifying genetic, molecular, or image-based biomarkers helps doctors diagnose cancer, predict patient responses, and guide individualized treatment. This approach is difficult because it requires high-dimensional, multimodal clinical dataset processing.

Traditional computer methods struggle to grasp these complicated data types' intricate, higher-order relationships. Infleqtion uses a Phases 1 and 2 hybrid quantum-classical process. This method preprocesses DNA, RNA, and diseased image data and uses unique optimisation algorithms to find interactions that prior methods ignore.

Hyper-RQAOA, a quantum procedure for near-term hardware, is a major technical advance in this research. The team improved quantum processing performance utilizing parameter transfer approaches for clinical dataset assessment.

Med Focus: Head-Neck Cancer

In Phase 3, Infleqtion will predict head-and-neck cancer therapeutic response using quantum-in-the-loop analysis. Using a UChicago-curated cohort to find modest but clinically useful biomarker sets for precision oncology decisions.

By working together, surgeons, biologists, and quantum scientists made the study successful, Gokhale said. This integrative method ensures clinically relevant and quantum hardware-compatible algorithms.

A Growing Quantum Innovation Portfolio

The Q4Bio development is part of Infleqtion's growing impact. The company's latest research with the University of Wisconsin Madison showed a more reliable method for detecting qubits without interfering with active circuits. This solution tackles a quantum computing constraint by speeding up calculation cycles while retaining delicate quantum states.

More than healthcare, Infleqtion is garnering government interest. The U.S. Army granted the company a $2 million Direct-to-Phase II SBIR contract to develop SAPIENT(Secured AI for Positioning at the Edge, Navigation, and Timing). In this 18-month project, Infleqtion's Contextual Machine Learning (CML) will provide robust navigation and timing data in hostile environments where GPS may fail.

Corporate and Market Growth

These technical achievements coincide with a major corporate change. In September 2025, Infleqtion announced a merger with Churchill Capital Corp X to go public. Despite its diverse product portfolio, the company wants to expand:

Sqale: Neutral-atom full-stack quantum computer with fault tolerance.

Tiqker: Next-generation critical infrastructure optical atomic clock.

Superstaq accelerates quantum application time to value with software.

Quantum RF Receivers: Rydberg atom-based spectrum sensing revolution.

Infleqtion will also present on quantum sensing applications at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. As it prepares for its NASDAQ listing and Wellcome Leap final demonstrations, the company is the preferred partner for governments and businesses seeking neutral-atom technology.

Q4Bio

Quantum Leap in Genomics: Sanger Institute and Colleagues Face Biological Data Future with Quantum Computing

Twenty-five years after decoding the human genome, the Wellcome Sanger Institute is spearheading a bold new genomics frontier by cooperating with Quantinuum, the world's foremost quantum computing startup. They depend on this relationship to compete in the Wellcome Leap Quantum for Bio (Q4Bio) project, which uses quantum computing to tackle genomics' computational restrictions. Supercomputers cannot search for biological secrets like this new project.

A “biological moonshot,” the 25-year-old Human Genome Project discovered the whole human blueprint, including over 3 billion base pairs. This groundbreaking discovery advanced medicine, science, and human biology. Next-generation sequencers, a "reference genome," and breakthroughs in algorithms and computer power can complete a 13-year, $2.7-billion process in 12 minutes for a few hundred dollars.

Due to their complexity, genomic problems still limit standalone conventional computers. Pangenomes—collections of genome sequences that reveal genetic variety in a population or species—are analysed. Pangenome data are best processed and displayed as a network or sequence graph showing common genetic linkages, unlike the linear human reference genomic. Mapping genomes to network nodes and finding the optimum paths across them need massive computational power. Pangenomes strive to connect human variability to the standard human reference genome, which is based on a few individuals.

To tackle these limitations, the Wellcome Leap Q4Bio competition funded quantum algorithm experiments that might revolutionise computational genetics in three to five years. The Wellcome Sanger Institute is pursuing two major initiatives under this program:

The Oxford-led Consortium for Complex Genomes seeks quantum algorithms to process the most complex and changeable genomes. Oxford leads it, together with the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Quantinuum, Cambridge, Melbourne, and Kyiv Academic University. They want to encode and process the PhiX174 genome using a quantum computer in the near future. This project is symbolic since Fred Sanger won his second Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980 for sequencing PhiX174. This would be the first time quantum computing has been proved to be effective in biology and indicate its readiness for practical deployment.

The Cambridge/Sanger/EMBL-EBI Pangenomics Project: The Q4Bio challenge awarded up to US $3.5 million to the project, which involves Cambridge, Wellcome Sanger, and EMBL-EBI academics. This paper addresses the computational challenges of developing, improving, and analysing pangenomic databases for large population samples. The team wants to develop quantum computing methods to speed up mapping data to graph nodes and finding efficient paths through complex pangenome graphs.

The Sanger Institute chose Quantinuum, the world's largest quantum computer company, as a technological partner because of its dominance in commercial quantum systems. System H2, its flagship quantum computer, still holds the world record for Quantum Volume, a test of performance on complex circuits, with a current benchmark of 8,388,608 (2^23). The scientific research team will benefit from Quantinuum's software, hardware, and quantum algorithm development expertise through this collaboration.

Quantum computing works differently from regular computing. Qubits can exist in multiple states concurrently through quantum superposition, unlike classical bits that store information as binary 0s or 1s. Quantum computers can solve problems that classical machines cannot due to entanglement and interference. By bringing the world's highest performing quantum computers to this collaboration, we will help the team push the limits of genomics research with quantum algorithms and open new possibilities for health and medical science', said Quantinuum President and CEO Rajeeb Hazra, who was honoured to be chosen.

Although quantum computer hardware offers huge promise, its fundamental susceptibility to noise and decoherence limits its size and computing power. Quantum hardware is projected to advance in three to five years. In its early stages, co-developing hardware, software, and applications is the ideal method to advance this unique computational approach, according to the Q4Bio Challenge.

Using genetic data, new quantum algorithms are created, modelled, and implemented. These algorithms and methods will be tested and enhanced in robust HPC environments before being used to simulate quantum computing hardware. Small DNA sequences will be checked initially, then SARS-CoV-2, and lastly the human genome.

Dr. Sergii Strelchuk, Principal Investigator of the University of Cambridge-led program, noted that quantum computing speedups can solve many tough pan genomics and computational genomics problems due to their structure. By comparing the early stages to “designing a rocket and training the astronauts,” c Sanger Institute Principal Systems Administrator David Holland recognised the innovation of showing a pangenome in a quantum context. While starting from scratch, the program builds on “decades of systematically annotated genomic data generated by researchers worldwide,” Dr. David Yuan, EMBL-EBI initiative Lead, stressed the importance of open data and collaborative science.

This work has great promise. Personalised treatment based on genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors may benefit by comparing individual human genomes to a human pangenome instead of the existing single reference genome. Quantum-powered bacterial and viral genome methods may help track and control infection outbreaks.