IBM unveils the world's first private, medical quantum computer!
On March 20, the Cleveland Clinic, a global medical shrine, and IBM officially announced the deployment of a medical quantum computer in the United States. Installed at the Cleveland Clinic, the IBM Quantum System One will be the world's first quantum computer dedicated to healthcare research, designed to help the Cleveland Clinic accelerate biomedical discoveries.
In response, Tom Mihaljevic, MD, CEO and president of Cleveland Clinic and Morton L. Mandel CEO Chair, said, "This is a key milestone in our innovation partnership with IBM as we explore new ways to apply the power of quantum computing to healthcare. "
"This technology holds great promise for revolutionizing healthcare and accelerating the delivery of new care, treatments and solutions to patients. Quantum and other advanced computing technologies will help researchers solve historical scientific bottlenecks and potentially find new treatments for patients with diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes."
"With the unveiling of IBM Quantum System One at the Cleveland Clinic, their world-class research team can now explore and discover new scientific advances in biomedical research," said Arvind Krishna, chairman and CEO of IBM." By combining the power of quantum computing, artificial intelligence and other next-generation technologies with Cleveland Clinic's world-renowned leadership in healthcare and life sciences, we hope to ignite a new era."
Congressman Shontel Brown (OH-11), IBM Senior Vice President and Director of Research Dario Gil, IBM Vice Chairman Gary Cohn, Ohio Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted, Tom Mihaljevic, M.D., Cleveland Clinic CEO and President, Cleveland Mayor Justin M. Bibb and Susan Monarez, Ph.D., deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), pose in front of the IBM Quantum System One on the Cleveland Clinic's main campus.
Now, several scientists from around the world have planned trips to Cleveland to see if quantum computing can help them conduct scientific research as well.
The unveiling is a major milestone in the 10-year Discovery Accelerator partnership between the Cleveland Clinic and IBM announced in 2021.
On March 30, local time, Cleveland Clinic and IBM announced a 10-year partnership to create a Discovery Accelerator, a joint Cleveland Clinic-IBM center with the goal of radically accelerating the pace of discovery in healthcare and life sciences using a mix of high-performance cloud computing, artificial intelligence and quantum computing technologies.
The Cleveland Clinic-IBM Discovery Accelerator has yielded several projects that leverage the latest in quantum computing, artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud to help accelerate discovery in biomedical research. These projects include.
1) Developing a quantum computing pipeline to screen and optimize drugs that target specific proteins.
2) Improving quantum-enhanced prediction models for cardiovascular risk after non-cardiac surgery.
3) applying artificial intelligence to search genome sequencing results and large drug target databases for effective existing drugs to help patients with Alzheimer's and other diseases.
Discovery Accelerator also serves as the technology foundation for the Cleveland Clinic's Global Center for Pathogen and Human Health Research, which is part of the Cleveland Innovation District. Supported by a $500 million investment from the State of Ohio, the State of Ohio and the Cleveland Clinic, the Center brings together a team focused on research, preparedness and prevention of emerging pathogens and virus-related diseases. Through Discovery Accelerator, researchers are leveraging advanced computing technologies to accelerate critical research on treatments and vaccines.
Beyond technology, an important part of Discovery Accelerator is focused on educating the workforce of the future and creating jobs to grow the economy.
Both organizations are designing an innovative educational curriculum for participants from high school to professional level, offering training and certification courses in data science, machine learning and quantum computing to build the skilled workforce needed for future cutting-edge computing research. In addition, they are conducting research symposia, seminars and workshops for academia, industry, government and the public with the goal of developing quantum computing experts in Cleveland.
Since the birth of medicine thousands of years ago, it has continued to absorb new ideas, knowledge and methods to become more effective. Quantum computing is very young, but as the only known computational model with exponential speed compared to traditional methods, it promises to be one of the most powerful tools in healthcare and medicine, with the ability to make previously intractable problems solvable.
Medicine, including healthcare and life sciences, has seen a great deal of quantum-related activity and experimentation in the past few years; the rapid rise of quantum computing in health and medicine has necessitated a more detailed study of this field.
Combining more than 40 experimental/theoretical studies from the last few years, the quantum medical use case areas cover genomics, clinical research and discovery, diagnostics, and therapeutics and interventions. These studies can be grouped into three main use case areas.
Genomics and clinical research
Diagnostics
Therapeutics and Interventions
The three key quantum medicine use case areas are linked to the quantum algorithm application categories.
Quantum computing use cases in health and medicine that have been investigated in proof-of-concept studies
For many of the proof-of-concept use cases described above, quantum methods can already compete with classical benchmarks. For example, many existing treatments fail to achieve the expected results due to individual variability. Classical machine learning can predict future disease risk for a range of patient populations based on EHRs; however, challenges remain due to the characteristics of electronic medical records and other health-related data, including the level of noise, the size of the feature space of interest, and the complexity of feature interactions.
Quantum-enhanced machine learning techniques can predict risk earlier, more accurately, and with greater granularity.
However, knowing a person's risk of disease is not enough. It is equally important to know how to make effective medical interventions for any given individual - to study drug sensitivity at the cellular level. Quantum-enhanced machine learning can support further breakthroughs in this area and ultimately enable causal inference models for drugs.
Quantum computing will accelerate the shift from umbrella diagnostics and treatments to precision health diagnostics.
However, a wide range of technical and ethical challenges must also be overcome for quantum computing to become an enabler of health and medicine.
Examples of challenges that must be addressed for quantum computing to become transformative in health and medicine.
First, quantum hardware and software will need to continue to improve, including increasing the number of quantum bits, reducing error rates, and more efficient algorithms.
Second, there are challenges around making quantum computing practical in medicine that are similar to those in digital health efforts. These include data accessibility (without which even quantum computing loses its power), model interpretability (critical to gaining support from clinicians, medical practitioners, and individuals), and patient privacy (critical to developing long-term personal trust in the technology).
Third, new challenges specific to quantum computing have emerged. Examples include data security, replicability, and skill development.
The development of medical-focused quantum computing collaborations and consortia is critical to addressing many of these challenges.
IBM has also reported that "healthcare could benefit greatly from quantum computing. However, much of the early intellectual property in quantum computing is likely to be proprietary, raising the urgency to begin engaging with partners and ecosystems today."
This successful deployment of IBM's medical quantum computer at the Cleveland Clinic is not only a milestone in their Discovery Accelerator partnership, but also a successful example of the quantum medicine ecosystem.
Such ecosystems are beginning to emerge to help practitioners approach problems with a quantum mindset. All of this will take time and effort, but the significant rewards on the road to quantum-enhanced health and medicine make it a very worthwhile journey: one that should be started sooner rather than later.
About the Cleveland Clinic
Cleveland Clinic, a not-for-profit, multi-specialty academic medical center, combines clinical and hospital care with research and education. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, it was founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision to provide outstanding patient care based on the principles of collaboration, compassion and innovation.
The Cleveland Clinic has pioneered many medical breakthroughs, including coronary artery bypass surgery and the first face transplant in the United States. Cleveland Clinic has more than 5,658 salaried physicians and researchers and 19,000 registered nurses and advanced practice physicians among its 77,000 employees worldwide. As of 2022, the entire Cleveland Clinic health system has a total of 12.8 million outpatient visits, 303,000 hospitalizations and observations, and 270,000 surgical cases, with patients from all 50 states and 185 countries in the United States.
