Cleveland Clinic and IBM have installed the first healthcare quantum computer at the health system, SDxCentral reported March 20.
The healthcare computer, dubbed IBM's Quantum System One, is dedicated to healthcare research and was installed at the Lerner Research Institute at Cleveland Clinic's main campus.
Cleveland Clinic's Chief Research Information Officer Lara Jehi, MD, said quantum computing development has the ability to screen and optimize drugs targeted to specific proteins and can refine the quantum-enhanced prediction model for cardiovascular risk following non-cardiac surgery.
"We decided to have this technology on site as it provides our team the ability to tap into these new computational spaces that could help researchers discover new medicines and treatments more quickly," Dr. Jehi said. "Currently, there are numerous scientific inquiries waiting in queues to be used on shared quantum computers via the cloud. By having our own dedicated on-premises system, our researchers' experiments take priority and, if successful, we get answers more quickly."
The move is a part of Cleveland Clinic's 10-year agreement aimed at advancing the pace of biomedical research through high-performance computing.