Accelerating Drug Development: The Role of Quantum Computing in Pharmaceutical Research
Abstract
The journey to develop drugs is long, time-consuming, and costly.Most drugs take years and billions of dollars before they hit the market.Traditional computations remain useful but have inadequacies to accurately reproduce molecular interactions and predict drug efficacy.Quantum computing represents a new tool to potentially revolutionize the challenges brought about by traditional computations in that it can more quickly and accurately solve several of these problems through applying the principles of quantum mechanics.This review examines the possibility of quantum computing to transform pharmaceutical research and drug development.The aim of this review is to give the reader an all-round perspective on the use of quantum computing in drug discovery, with its contributions to molecular modeling, drug-target interaction prediction, and pharmacological property optimization.It promises something new in the application of quantum algorithms to make up for the faults of classical methods used in pharmaceutical research.This review critically synthesizes a number of relevant studies that applied quantum computing capabilities to drug design.Particular attention is brought to quantum algorithms, including but not limited to VQE (Variational Quantum Eigensolver) and QAOA (Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm), in determining molecular structures in silico along with the capacity to predict chemical binding affinities.Secondly, the scope of the drugs-discovery application on…
How strong is the evidence?
Evidence Hub reads this as a book / chapter, done in computer models (in silico), not in people. Its evidence level is 5 of 5 (Very low · case / narrative / animal / in vitro / in silico). Case reports, narrative reviews, and animal, cell or computer-model studies give the weakest evidence for human health.
Read the paper
Related studies
- In silico toxicology protocols
- QM7-X, a comprehensive dataset of quantum-mechanical properties spanning the chemical space of small organic molecules
- Quantum Informed Machine-Learning Potentials for Molecular Dynamics Simulations of CO2's Chemisorption and Diffusion in Mg-MOF-74
- In-silico strategies in nano-drug design: Bridging nanomaterials and pharmacological applications
- mRNA codon optimization with quantum computers
- The computational power of the human brain
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.