Building the world’s first quantum app for protein folding with Rigetti

Rigetti announced today that ProteinQure will be one of Rigetti’s Developer Partners to develop the first generation of practical quantum applications.

We are proud to become one of the Rigetti Quantum Cloud Service (QCS) Developer Partners! This marks the beginning of an ecosystem for near-term quantum applications and we are excited to be at the forefront of this quantum/classical computing paradigm. As part of this partnership, we will be building publicly available tools to conduct research at the intersection of quantum computing and biology to help facilitate the growth of this highly interdisciplinary field.

Rigetti Computing, a Series B startup founded by former IBM employee Chad Rigetti, is one of the leading full-stack quantum computing platforms in the world. The developer partner program provides us with access to their cloud service and new product releases in order to engineer groundbreaking quantum applications for drug discovery and computational biology. It will enable us to distribute our applications to customers and allow the broader quantum computing community to build with our technology and conduct research.

Building the world’s first quantum app ecosystem

If you’ve been following our last few blog posts, you know that we are working hard on continuously pushing the boundaries when it comes to protein folding on quantum computers. As of today, we’ve folded the largest proteins on two different quantum computing architectures, quantum annealers as well as universal quantum computers. Rigetti Computing is building universal quantum computers and is doubling down with its own semiconductor fabrication plant. They have recently announced an ambitious one-year goal to build a quantum chip with 128 qubits. Alongside its hardware advancements, Rigetti has earned its reputation with its popular and well maintained full-stack quantum software library Forest. Forest is an open-source project available on GitHub and over the past months ProteinQure actively contributed to the development of this software. With the new Quantum Cloud Service, Rigetti is democratizing quantum algorithms with application-based quantum computing. This means that quantum software startups like ProteinQure will be able to write apps that can be accessed through the new QCS virtual environment. This will enable large multinational companies to access the benefits of quantum computing algorithms without needing to be experts themselves.

As part of this effort, we will build the world’s first quantum app for protein folding on top of Forest. This app can then be used as a plug-and-play research tool by pharma companies and independent researchers in the biotech space.

Quantum-classical hybrid approach to protein design

Here’s a quick high-level overview of our hybrid classical/quantum approach to protein design:

1. We use state-of-the-art classical algorithms for generating protein folds and scoring them for a given protein sequence.
2. These simulations are computationally intensive, even on modern GPUs, and rapidly become computationally intractable for large proteins.
3. We perform exhaustive calculations of protein folds using simplified models with quantum computers which speed up our classical algorithms.
4. By integrating machine learning techniques with chemical intuition from biologists and chemists, we can generate proteins for therapeutic applications.

In our next blog post, we are going to share more detailed insights on how classical molecular simulations can be amplified with our soon to be released quantum app for protein folding.