HELSINKI/LONDON, April 16, 2026 -- Quantum software company Algorithmiq has become the sole winner of a $2 million prize by Wellcome Leap for being the first and only contestant to successfully demonstrate quantum computing’s potential to simulate complex therapeutics, unlocking a credible path to near-term quantum advantage in health.

The award marks the conclusion of Wellcome Leap’s Quantum for Bio (Q4Bio) challenge, a 2.5-year, $50 million program that challenged research teams globally to demonstrate biology and healthcare applications on emerging quantum hardware. Algorithmiq developed the winning quantum computing framework based on three simultaneous requirements: executability on current hardware, relevance to biologically meaningful systems, and validation against state-of-the-art classical methods under realistic resource assumptions. Alongside Algorithmiq, finalists included teams led by Infleqtion, University of Nottingham, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Oxford.

Algorithmiq’s groundbreaking end-to-end quantum–classical workflow for chemistry simulations was deployed using up to 100 qubits on IBM hardware to simulate the activation pathway of a photosensitiser drug, currently in Phase II clinical trials. The results demonstrate a scalable path toward quantum advantage in drug discovery.

Many different use cases have been proposed for quantum computing but it has remained elusive whether this emerging technology brings benefits over classical state-of-the art methods for these applications. Demonstrating the latter has been the key challenge in the field over the past decades. Algorithmiq’s results show that quantum computing can deliver meaningful value for real-world drug development and discovery, rather than abstract benchmarks.

The winning team’s work focused on photodynamic therapy (PDT), a promising cancer treatment that uses light-activated drugs to destroy tumour cells and comes with significant patient benefits, such as reducing detrimental side effects over traditional treatments. The discovery of new photosensitisers for PDT has been hindered by the lack of reliable data. The team showed that such data can be efficiently obtained and integrated to an active learning AI loop to generate novel drug candidates. The impact of this work goes beyond photodynamic therapy and is transferable to wider use cases across healthcare and life sciences.

The project was led by Dr. Sabrina Maniscalco with co-principal investigators Dr. Ivano Tavernelli of IBM, and Dr. Vijay Krishna of Cleveland Clinic. The effort was supported by IBM and by Cleveland Clinic’s Quantum Innovation Catalyzer program. The award follows a year of commercial successes for Algorithmiq, marked by collaborations with Microsoft and IBM, as well as the launch of the Quantum Advantage Tracker with IBM and their partners - the first open, community-led benchmark for verifying claims of quantum advantage.

Dr Sabrina Maniscalco, CEO and Co-Founder of Algorithmiq, said: “Algorithmiq is the first, and the only team in Q4Bio, to deliver a scalable end-to-end computational framework that combines quantum computing and AI for real therapeutic problems, demonstrated on up to 100 qubits. It shows that quantum computing can already tackle scientifically meaningful drug-development questions under real hardware constraints.”

“Cleveland Clinic’s role in this collaborative project was to help define and anchor the biomedical challenge in a clinically relevant use case,” says Vijay Krishna, PhD, the lead Cleveland Clinic researcher on the project. “As home to the first quantum computer dedicated to healthcare research, we have focused on charting quantum applications in the life sciences by bringing biological, clinical, and translational expertise to important biomedical problems. This award reflects the value of combining that expertise with excellence in quantum hardware and algorithm development. By improving how we model light-activated drug behavior, this work could help advance photodynamic therapy and support the development of better photosensitizers for cancer treatment.”