Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM Team Advances Quantum Computing for Drug Discovery

A multidisciplinary team from Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN and IBM has been named as a finalist for the 2026 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for simulating the largest biologically meaningful molecules ever modeled with quantum computers.

The team combined IBM Quantum Heron processors with three supercomputers - Fugaku, Miyabi-G, and ROQUO - to calculate protein structures and binding energies of molecular systems containing up to 12,635 atoms.

This approach could help researchers model how potential medicines interact with protein targets while reducing computational demands, manual data transfers, and errors.