October 10, 2024 -- Generative AI is set to transform industries across the globe and healthcare is widely regarded as one of the most promising areas with immense benefit to society.  In particular, the potential to use generative AI tools for the design of therapeutics with best-in-class characteristics has been attracting a lot of attention from researchers in pharma and AI. A further transformative is quantum computing where Mckinsey stated that, “connecting Generative AI and Quantum Computing could create an impact larger than the sum of the two technologies”. At the crossroads of therapeutic design, AI, and quantum computing stands Prof. Timothy Patrick Jenkins, Associate Professor and Head of Data Science at the Technical University of Denmark Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine.

Prof. Jenkins recently presented at the BioTechX conference – Europe’s largest bioinformatics gathering – on “Unlocking Peptide Design with Quantum-Enhanced Generative AI”. He described results from a collaboration with ORCA Computing, Sparrow Computing and PSNC where quantum computing was used to enhance generative AI models in the context of vaccine design.  Specifically, he and his PhD student, Jonathan Funk, investigated whether the quantum approach outperformed classical methods in designing peptides with a higher likelihood of triggering an immune response by being immunogenic.  Notably, they discovered that the quantum-guided model not only outperformed the classical approach but also learned to generate peptides more quickly.

They hypothesize that this advantage may stem from the quantum element’s ability to enhance the diversity of target peptides. In a generative adversarial network (GAN), leveraging a quantum distribution allows sampling from a non-linear, high-dimensional space of potential peptides, capturing complex biological relationships. This could explain why the quantum model outperforms its classical counterpart.

Though still in the development stage, it is a promising indication of the potential impact quantum-enhanced approaches could have on vaccine development and broader therapeutic applications.