POLARISqb And Scientist.com Partner to Offer Online Access to Quantum-Aided Drug Design

Insider Brief

• POLARISqb and Scientist.com partnered to offer researchers online access to POLARISqb’s Quantum-Aided Drug Design (QuADD) platform.
• Under the partnership, Scientist.com marketplace customers can use quantum computing to create optimized molecular libraries for drug design.
• QuADD is a platform that translates the molecular library building problem into an optimization problem which can be solved with a quantum annealing computer.

PRESS RELEASE — POLARISqb, the first company to build quantum-enabled molecular optimization tools for drug discovery, and Scientist.com, the life science industry’s leading online marketplace for outsourced research, have partnered to offer researchers online access to POLARISqb’s Quantum-Aided Drug Design (QuADD) platform. Scientist.com marketplace users can now utilize quantum computing to create optimized molecular libraries for drug design in days rather than months.

“POLARISqb was the first company to develop a drug discovery platform that utilizes the well-documented optimization power of today’s quantum computers,” stated Bill Shipman, CTO and Co-Founder of POLARISqb. “We look forward to working with the team at Scientist.com to make this platform available to their vast network of scientists and researchers, who can use our tools to accelerate the search for novel drug candidates. POLARISqb uses quantum annealing computers that complete calculations more than 500x faster than conventional computers.”

QuADD is a software platform that translates the molecular library building problem into an optimization problem which can be solved with a quantum annealing computer. QuADD targets a specific binding pocket to find novel, bioavailable, and synthesizable lead-like hits from a potential chemical space of up to 10^30 molecules in 1-3 days. The input for the QuADD pipeline is a customer-defined structure of the protein binding pocket and ligand. The output is a library of candidates that target the specific binding pocket of interest and have molecular properties that meet the goals of the drug discovery project. The company has recently released several white papers describing how QuADD achieves these results.

“At Scientist.com, we are committed to supporting companies like POLARISqb that are at the cutting edge of drug research innovation,” said Kevin Lustig, PhD, CEO and Founder of Scientist.com. “POLARISqb’s QuADD software has the potential to significantly accelerate the discovery of new drug candidates for hundreds of human diseases.”