The consortium has today been awarded a £6.85M grant by Innovate UK’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) to build a commercially scalable quantum computer designed to tackle prohibitively high costs within pharmaceutical drug development.
Professor Chas Bountra, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Innovation at Oxford University, says: ‘We in academia need to do everything possible to help our industry colleagues accelerate the development of new medicines for patients. I am immensely excited about this project – it is an opportunity for us to work with so many technology leaders and potentially transform the process of drug discovery. We must make it better, faster and cheaper.’
The partnership will accelerate the use of quantum computing within pharmaceutical research to dramatically reduce the time required for drug development on a global scale.
Professor Charlotte Deane, who leads the Oxford Protein Informatics Group in the Department of Statistics and Professor Frank Von Delft, at the Centre for Medicines Discovery at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, will be leading from Oxford University.