Scott Buchholz, Deloitte’s Quantum Computing Leader Discusses the Technology’s Future in Healthcare

(HealthcareNews) Scott Buchholz, emerging technology research director and government and public services CTO, Deloitte Consulting; recently spoke with Healthcare News about the future of quantum computing in healthcare. Inside Quantum Technology Daily News summarizes here.
Buchholz explains, “Quantum computing has enormous potential in healthcare and has started to impact the industry in various ways.”
Quantum computing offers the ability to track and diagnose disease. Using sensors, quantum technology has the ability to track the progress of cancer treatments and diagnose and monitor such degenerative diseases as multiple sclerosis.
The tech also can help modernize supply chains. Quantum technology can solve routing issues in real time using live data such as weather and traffic updates to help determine the most efficient method of delivery.
quantum technology can impact early-stage drug discovery. Pharmaceuticals can take a decade or longer to bring to market. Quantum computing could lower the costs and reduce the time.
Because of how differently they work, they aren’t well suited for all problems, but they’re a fit for certain types of problems, such as molecular simulation, optimization and machine learning.
“Because quantum computers can simulate atoms and other molecules much better than classical computers, researchers are investigating the future feasibility of doing drug discovery, target protein matching, calculating protein folding and more,” he continued.
“That is, during the drug discovery process, they could be useful to dramatically reduce the time required to sort through existing databases of molecules to look for targets, identify potential new drugs with novel properties, identify potential new targets and more.”
Quantum computing may also – directly and indirectly – lead to the ability to diagnose disease,” Buchholz said. “Given future machines’ ability to sort through complex problems quickly, they may be able to accelerate the processing of some of the techniques that are being developed today, say those that are designed to identify harmful genetic mutations or combinations.
“While the technology to solve the ‘at scale’ problems is still several years in the future, researchers currently are working hard today to put the foundations in place to tackle these problems as the hardware capacity of quantum computers advances.