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It has been a little over a year since researchers at the University of Saskatchewan gained access to one of the world’s most powerful machines, the quantum computer.
Now, the Centre for Quantum Topology and Its Applications (quanTA) team is partnering up with the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO), along with several other researchers, to help speed up vaccine development.
“A lot of places in the world are working on just getting quantum computers up and running and saying at some point we will be able to do something good with it… we’re not waiting,” said the USask director for the quanTA centre, Steven Rayan.
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The researchers will identify pathogens of concern and use the quantum computer to make a digital twin of the virus or bacteria. Then, they will use the computer to test multiple vaccine scenarios and effects one may find in nature to see how it works. This, in turn, will be faster than trying to replicate these tests in a lab.
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“It is kind of like you have a boy at the top of the hill on a sled, and he goes down and you see where the sled goes right? There are different places he could end up but that’s the path nature picked. So, this is a form of computing where we let nature do the work for us,” explained Steven.
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The goal of these studies is to discover vaccines in less than 100 days after the start of a new pandemic.
“Think of all the human suffering we could have saved had we been able to develop the COVID vaccine months, maybe even weeks instead of over a year. So that is what we are shooting for,” said VIDO principal investigator, Gordon Broderick.
The university gains access to this quantum computer, located in Quebec, via IBM’s Quantum Division and PINQ².
PrairiesCan, through the Regional Innovation Ecosystem Program, has also contributed several funds to USask for the quantum computing initiative.
This research makes the University of Saskatchewan one of the only universities in Canada pursuing such innovative vaccine research.
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