Quantum Computing Joins the Next Frontier in Genomics
The Sanger Institute, a world-leading research institute, has selected Quantinuum’s quantum computer to explore new solutions in complex genomics
- The Sanger Institute illustrates the value of quantum computing to genomics research
- Quantinuum supports developments in a field that promises to deliver a profound and positive societal impact
Twenty-five years ago, scientists accomplished a task likened to a biological moonshot: the sequencing of the entire human genome.
The Human Genome Project revealed a complete human blueprint comprising around 3 billion base pairs, the chemical building blocks of DNA. It led to breakthrough medical treatments, scientific discoveries, and a new understanding of the biological functions of our body.
Thanks to technological advances in the quarter-century since, what took 13 years and cost $2.7 billion then can now be done in under 12 minutes for a few hundred dollars. Improved instruments such as next-generation sequencers and a better understanding of the human genome – including the availability of a “reference genome” – have aided progress, alongside enormous advances in algorithms and computing power.
But even today, some genomic challenges remain so complex that they stretch beyond the capabilities of the most powerful classical computers operating in isolation. This has sparked a bold search for new computational paradigms, and in particular, quantum computing.
Quantum Challenge: Accepted
The Wellcome Leap Quantum for Bio (Q4Bio) challenge is pioneering this new frontier. The program funds research to develop quantum algorithms that can overcome current computational bottlenecks. It aims to test the classical boundaries of computational genetics in the next 3-5 years.
One consortium – led by the University of Oxford and supported by prestigious partners including the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Universities of Cambridge, Melbourne, and Kyiv Academic University – is taking a leading role.
“The overall goal of the team’s project is to perform a range of genomic processing tasks for the most complex and variable genomes and sequences – a task that can go beyond the capabilities of current classical computers” – Wellcome Sanger Institute press release, July 2025
Selecting Quantinuum
Earlier this year, the Sanger Institute selected Quantinuum as a technology partner in their bid to succeed in the Q4Bio challenge.
Our flagship quantum computer, System H2, has for many years led the field of commercially available systems for qubit fidelity and consistently holds the global record for Quantum Volume, currently benchmarked at 8,388,608 (223).
In this collaboration, the scientific research team can take advantage of Quantinuum’s full stack approach to technology development, including hardware, software, and deep expertise in quantum algorithm development.
“We were honored to be selected by the Sanger Institute to partner in tackling some of the most complex challenges in genomics. By bringing the world’s highest performing quantum computers to this collaboration, we will help the team push the limits of genomics research with quantum algorithms and open new possibilities for health and medical science.” – Rajeeb Hazra, President and CEO of Quantinuum
Quantum for Biology
At the heart of this endeavor, the consortium has announced a bold central mission for the coming year: to encode and process an entire genome using a quantum computer. This achievement would be a potential world-first and provide evidence for quantum computing’s readiness for tackling real-world use cases.
Their chosen genome, the bacteriophage PhiX174, carries symbolic weight, as its sequencing earned Fred Sanger his second Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1980. Successfully encoding this genome quantum mechanically would represent a significant milestone for both genomics and quantum computing.
Sooner than many expect, quantum computing may play an essential role in tackling genomic challenges at the very frontier of human health. The Sanger Institute and Quantinuum’s partnership reminds us that we may soon reach an important step forward in human health research – one that could change medicine and computational biology as dramatically as the original Human Genome Project did a quarter-century ago.
“Quantum computational biology has long inspired us at Quantinuum, as it has the potential to transform global health and empower people everywhere to lead longer, healthier, and more dignified lives.” – Ilyas Khan, Founder and Chief Product Officer of Quantinuum
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, pioneers powerful quantum computers and advanced software solutions. Quantinuum’s technology drives breakthroughs in materials discovery, cybersecurity, and next-gen quantum AI. With over 500 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, Quantinuum leads the quantum computing revolution across continents.
Quantinuum is focusing on redefining what’s possible in hybrid quantum–classical computing by integrating Quantinuum’s best-in-class systems with high-performance NVIDIA accelerated computing to create powerful new architectures that can solve the world’s most pressing challenges.
The launch of Helios, Powered by Honeywell, the world’s most accurate quantum computer, marks a major milestone in quantum computing. Helios is now available to all customers through the cloud or on-premise deployment, launched with a go-to-market offering that seamlessly pairs Helios with the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell platform, targeting specific end markets such as drug discovery, finance, materials science, and advanced AI research.
We are also working with NVIDIA to adopt NVIDIA NVQLink, an open system architecture, as a standard for advancing hybrid quantum-classical supercomputing. Using this technology with Quantinuum Guppy and the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform, Quantinuum has implemented NVIDIA accelerated computing across Helios and future systems to perform real-time decoding for quantum error correction.
In an industry-first demonstration, an NVIDIA GPU-based decoder integrated in the Helios control engine improved the logical fidelity of quantum operations by more than 3% — a notable gain given Helios’ already exceptionally low error rate. These results demonstrate how integration with NVIDIA accelerated computing through NVQLink can directly enhance the accuracy and scalability of quantum computation.
This unique collaboration spans the full Quantinuum technology stack. Quantinuum’s next-generation software development environment allows users to interleave quantum and GPU-accelerated classical computations in a single workflow. Developers can build hybrid applications using tools such as NVIDIA CUDA-Q, NVIDIA CUDA-QX, and Quantinuum’s Guppy, to make advanced quantum programming accessible to a broad community of innovators.
The collaboration also reaches into applied research through the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Computing Research Center (NVAQC), where an NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 supercomputer can be paired with Quantinuum’s Helios to further drive hybrid quantum-GPU research, including the development of breakthrough quantum-enhanced AI applications.
A recent achievement illustrates this potential: The ADAPT-GQE framework, a transformer-based Generative Quantum AI (GenQAI) approach, uses a Generative AI model to efficiently synthesize circuits to prepare the ground state of a chemical system on a quantum computer. Developed by Quantinuum, NVIDIA, and a pharmaceutical industry leader—and leveraging NVIDIA CUDA-Q with GPU-accelerated methods—ADAPT-GQE achieved a 234x speed-up in generating training data for complex molecules. The team used the framework to explore imipramine, a molecule crucial to pharmaceutical development. The transformer was trained on imipramine conformers to synthesize ground state circuits at orders of magnitude faster than ADAPT-VQE, and the circuit produced by the transformer was run on Helios to prepare the ground state using InQuanto, Quantinuum's computational chemistry platform.
From collaborating on hardware and software integrations to GenQAI applications, the collaboration between Quantinuum and NVIDIA is building the bridge between classical and quantum computing and creating a future where AI becomes more expansive through quantum computing, and quantum computing becomes more powerful through AI.
By Dr. Noah Berthusen
The earliest works on quantum error correction showed that by combining many noisy physical qubits into a complex entangled state called a "logical qubit," this state could survive for arbitrarily long times. QEC researchers devote much effort to hunt for codes that function well as "quantum memories," as they are called. Many promising code families have been found, but this is only half of the story.
Being able to keep a qubit around for a long time is one thing, but to realize the theoretical advantages of quantum computing we need to run quantum circuits. And to make sure noise doesn't ruin our computation, these circuits need to be run on the logical qubits of our code. This is often much more challenging than performing gates on the physical qubits of our device, as these "logical gates" often require many physical operations in their implementation. What's more, it often is not immediately obvious which logical gates a code has, and so converting a physical circuit into a logical circuit can be rather difficult.
Some codes, like the famous surface code, are good quantum memories and also have easy logical gates. The drawback is that the ratio of physical qubits to logical qubits (the "encoding rate") is low, and so many physical qubits are required to implement large logical algorithms. High-rate codes that are good quantum memories have also been found, but computing on them is much more difficult. The holy grail of QEC, so to speak, would be a high-rate code that is a good quantum memory and also has easy logical gates. Here, we make progress on that front by developing a new code with those properties.
Building on prior error correcting codes
A recent work from Quantinuum QEC researchers introduced genon codes. The underlying construction method for these codes, called the "symplectic double cover," also provided a way to obtain logical gates that are well suited for Quantinuum's QCCD architecture. Namely, these "SWAP-transversal" gates are performed by applying single qubit operations and relabeling the physical qubits of the device. Thanks to the all-to-all connectivity facilitated through qubit movement on the QCCD architecture, this relabeling can be done in software essentially for free. Combined with extremely high fidelity (~1.2 x10-5) single-qubit operations, the resulting logical gates are similarly high fidelity.
Given the promise of these codes, we take them a step further in our new paper. We combine the symplectic double codes with the [[4,2,2]] Iceberg code using a procedure called "code concatenation". A concatenated code is a bit like nesting dolls, with an outer code containing codes within it---with these too potentially containing codes. More technically, in a concatenated code the logical qubits of one code act as the physical qubits of another code.
The new codes, which we call "concatenated symplectic double codes", were designed in such a way that they have many of these easily-implementable SWAP-transversal gates. Central to its construction, we show how the concatenation method allows us to "upgrade" logical gates in terms of their ease of implementation; this procedure may provide insights for constructing other codes with convenient logical gates. Notably, the SWAP-transversal gate set on this code is so powerful that only two additional operations (logical T and S) are necessary for universal computation. Furthermore, these codes have many logical qubits, and we also present numerical evidence to suggest that they are good quantum memories.
Concatenated symplectic double codes have one of the easiest logical computation schemes, and we didn’t have to sacrifice rate to achieve it. Looking forward in our roadmap, we are targeting hundreds of logical qubits at ~ 1x 10-8 logical error rate by 2029. These codes put us in a prime position to leverage the best characteristics of our hardware and create a device that can achieve real commercial advantage.
Every year, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC) brings together the global supercomputing community to explore the technologies driving the future of computing.
At this year’s conference, from November 16th – 21st in St. Louis, Missouri, Quantinuum showcased how our quantum hardware, software, and partnerships are helping define the next era of high-performance and quantum computing.
Quantinuum in the Expo Hall
The Quantinuum team was on-site at booth #4432 to showcase how we’re building the bridge between HPC and quantum. Folks stopped by our booth to see:
- Live demo unit of our quantum hardware
- Our new Helios replica, providing an up-close look at the design behind our next-generation system
- The Helios chip, highlighting the innovation driving the world’s most advanced trapped-ion quantum computers
Our quantum computing experts hosted daily tutorials at our booth on Helios, our next-generation hardware platform, Nexus, our all-in-one quantum computing platform, and Hybrid Workflows, featuring the integration of NVIDIA CUDA-Q with Quantinuum Systems.
Speaking Sessions at SC25
Join our team as they share insights on the opportunities and challenges of quantum integration within the HPC ecosystem:
Panel Session: The Quantum Era of HPC: Roadmaps, Challenges and Opportunities in Navigating the Integration Frontier
November 19th | 10:30 – 12:00pm CST
During this panel session, Kentaro Yamamoto from Quantinuum, will join experts from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, IBM, QuEra, RIKEN, and Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre to explore how quantum and classical systems are being brought together to accelerate scientific discovery and industrial innovation.
BoF Session: Bridging the Gap: Making Quantum-Classical Hybridization Work in HPC
November 19th | 5:15 – 6:45pm CST
Quantum-classical hybrid computing is moving from theory to reality, yet no clear roadmap exists for how best to integrate quantum processing units (QPUs) into established HPC environments. In this Birds of a Feather discussion, co-led by Quantinuum’s Grahame Vittorini and representatives from BCS, DOE, EPCC, Inria, ORNL NVIDIA, and RIKEN we hope to bring together a global community of HPC practitioners, system architects, quantum computing specialists and workflow researchers, including participants in the Workflow Community Initiative, to assess the state of hybrid integration and identify practical steps toward scalable, impactful deployment.