The QHealth project arises with the intention of offering new solutions in the field of pharmacogenomics, an interdisciplinary science that combines pharmacology, genomics, molecular biology, statistics and computational science to address individual variation in drug response.

But what does quantum computing have to do with pharmacogenomics? Well, the thing is that medical scientists deal with massive data in order to study issues such as the gene expression in the presence of drugs. So, computational science meets an interesting challenge here: storage, plumbing, cleansing, analytics … all the layers of the big data stack. The computing power required for these tasks represents a hard handicap for classical computational approaches. Quantum computing has a lot to do with that, mainly in the analysis of the data, specially when it is massive and there is a big number of variables to study.

The technology of qubits allows massive storage of information and parallel access to it during the computation. The quantum software architecture that emerges from this hardware makes possible the development and implementation of algorithms for big data analysis that address issues not resolved by classical computational tools. Quantum algorithms are not only related with statistical solutions but also with artificial intelligence or a combination of both. This is an interesting option to be exploited.

Finally, it is important to mention that quantum computing is not a standalone technology. It works as a computational resource embedded into a classical hardware infrastructure. QHealth project will study the possibilities of using this hybrid classical/quantum implementation in the healthcare industry. In other words, the aim is to developed quantum software applied to pharmacogenomics.

QHealth project joins researchers, traditional and quantum technologists, data science specialists, physicist, pharmacogenomics, biologists and health professionals in meeting the great challenge of personalized medicine for healthcare improvement. And we are on the road …