Today we are proud to announce a partnership with BASF, the world’s largest chemical-producing company. Through this partnership, BASF joins the SEEQC-led QuPharma project, a project we launched with support from InnovateUK in 2022. With support from our partners at Riverlane, Oxford Instruments, Oxford University, and others to explore how quantum computing can accelerate the process of drug discovery, we are expanding our partnership with Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, a leading science and technology company by bringing BASF into the consortium. This research with BASF will specifically explore the potential of quantum in dissolved catalysts, otherwise known as homogeneous catalysis.
At SEEQC, our mission from day one has been to build scalable and energy-efficient quantum data centers based on our proprietary Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) digital chips to run quantum applications for global businesses. However, without partnerships with companies that support our mission, none of this will be possible.
Through this partnership, BASF joins the SEEQC-led QuPharma project, bringing substantial expertise to critical pharmaceutical research. Launched in November 2021, the QuPharma project serves to build and deliver a full-stack quantum computer that can be used alongside classical supercomputers to speed up the drug development process. SEEQC was awarded a £6.8 million ($9 million) contract from Innovate UK to lead the project.
“SEEQC is addressing the bottlenecks of scaling by integrating critical system functionality on a unique system-on-a-chip quantum computing platform,” said Horst Weiss, vice president, Next Generation Computing at BASF. “By partnering with SEEQC, we can investigate how to map our specific use case to its unique technology; achieving an earlier advantage in the NISQ era, and exploring how it can scale with fault-tolerant quantum computing.”
Not only does this project demonstrate how chemistry and quantum computing can work well together, but it also illustrates how quantum computing will affect a wide range of industries in meaningful ways. With this partnership, SEEQC proves its technical as well as commercial advantages over its competitors. Having a platform tailored to the pharmaceutical industry provides SEEQC and its partners with early access to a promising market.
Right now, quantum computing lives in labs across the world. However, one day, these technologies have the potential to be used to solve significant commercial problems that classical computing technologies simply cannot. The commercial applications of quantum computing could one day positively impact many different fields.