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Xanadu, Alberta Team to Speed Cancer Drug Discovery With Quantum
The collaboration targets photosensitizers for photodynamic therapy, a non-invasive cancer treatment. Xanadu CEO Christian Weedbrook has called quantum chemistry 'the lowest-hanging fruit' in drug discovery.
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Xanadu, the publicly traded quantum computing firm in Toronto, is partnering with the University of Alberta to build algorithms that could accelerate the search for light-activated cancer drugs. The research targets a class of molecules called photosensitizers, which are used in photodynamic therapy to destroy tumor cells with relatively few side effects.
The work will focus on developing a quantum computing framework for designing next-generation photosensitizers. Xanadu said discovering effective photosensitizers today is slow and expensive. The company recently published a paper showing how quantum computers can simulate interactions between light and those molecules. Alex Brown, a chemistry professor at Alberta, said standard computational methods cannot capture how photosensitizers behave when activated by light.