CompTIA, McKinsey & Company, and Deep Pharma Intelligence (DPI) list Quantum Computing as one of the top emerging and key technologies in their recent reports with growth opportunities and applications in different industries.
Image source: zdnet.com
CompTIA
CompTIA (The Computing Technology Industry Association) is a global community of informed advocates for modern technology, innovation- and learning-oriented association. Each year they publish a list of top emerging technologies with the greatest impact and both short- and long-term potentials in providing growth and solutions to their customers.
The technologies that made it to the list of 2020 are:
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
5G
Internet of Things (IoT)
Serverless Computing
Biometrics
Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
Blockchain
Robotics
Natural Language Processing
Quantum Computing
In their results, they highlight the ability of quantum computing to process big data as well as the opportunity to leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Top 10 emerging technologies according to CompTIA.
McKinsey & Company
McKinsey & Company is a large and old management consulting company, recognized by Vault as the most prestigious consulting firm in the world (Wikipedia).
The question that McKinsey asks in their recent insight is: what are the 10 most important tech trends that matter the most to executives and companies? In other words, in what kind of tech is it more profitable to invest? The list is focused on technologies that are attracting venture money, generating patents, and implications on how and where to compete.
The potential of emerging technologies seems to have exponential growth in our era. According to entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, in the next decade, we will see more progress than the past 100 years combined.
The list of the ten technological "boats" that you wouldn't want to miss, is made taking into account the momentum score for each tech, calculated based on these 6 metrics: patent filings, publications, news mentions, online search trends, private investment amount, and the number of companies making investments.
The following image, taken from the McKinsey document "The top trends in tech - executive summary", shows the list of the top 10 technology trends. Next-generation computing is ranked in 4th place and it includes two underlying technologies: Quantum Computing and Neuromorphic chips.
Top 10 technology trends, ranked by McKinsey Digital.
Quantum computing is considered a cross-cutting technology, with applications in different industries such as finance, logistics, pharmaceuticals, cybersecurity, etc. Furthermore, its combination with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (Quantum Machine Learning) is estimated to solve problems that today cannot be tackled by science, reducing costs and time of calculations, thus promising great profits and paving the way to new capabilities for businesses.
McKinsey has estimated a value potential of more than $1 trillion dollars of quantum-computing use cases at full scale by 2035! But what kind of disruptions is quantum computing predicted to bring in science and industry? New use cases such as molecule-level simulations are expected, leading to disruptions in materials, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals industries. In medicine: highly personalized products; in the automobile industry: faster diffusion of self-driving vehicles; in cryptography: breaking security algorithms that today are considered unbreakable in real-time (however, this negative consequence of the development of quantum computing will be handled with the so-called post-quantum algorithms, designed to be unbreakable by quantum computers).
McKinsey gives an estimation of the number of patents generated, starting with 268 thousand patents in 2015, growing to 368 thousand patents in 2020. Regarding news related to quantum computing, in 2015 there were around 8 thousand mentions, whereas in 2020 there were 19 thousand mentions of quantum computing, an impressively growing trend.
There are some issues that need to be addressed before being able to witness the real blossom of quantum computers and they are mainly related to quantum computing hardware. Such issues include: the scalability of quantum bits available and used for computing, decrease in error rate, and the development of quantum RAM. Decoherence is an issue that affects quantum computers, a technology built on the laws of quantum mechanics, where environmental noise destroys the information carried by quantum particles. Intensive research is carried to overcome these problems.
In the following graph, McKinsey positions Next-generation computing as a technology with very high industrial applicability, but at the moment it is in its first steps of the market-entry stage, with only partial technical maturity.
McKinsey tech trends index graph.
Deep Pharma Intelligence (DPI)
Deep Pharma Intelligence is a leading strategic and investment intelligence agency on the emerging markets in the Pharmaceutical, BioTech, and Healthcare Tech industries (cit).
In their recent report of August 2021, “Landscape of Advanced Technology Companies in Pharmaceutical Industry Q2 2021”, DPI provides insight into the expansion of technology developers and vendors in the pharma space. They tackle the topic of investment and business trends while giving insight into recent achievements of various technologies. More precisely, they divide the key players, technological trends, industry developments, and case studies into 6 categories:
Artificial Intelligence (R&D platforms)
"Big Tech" corporations
Quantum Computing
Autonomous labs and lab automation
Big data providers
Supporting services
Technology providers with increasing influence on Pharma Industry (DPI report).
The report ranks top 10 companies by the number of deals in pharma and healthcare, with the American big tech corporation Google as a leader (121 deals), followed by Nvidia (47 deals), Microsoft (36 deals), Chinese big companies Tencent (18 deals), Alibaba (18 deals), Baidu (18 deals), then IBM (18 deals), Apple (15 deals), Intel (6 deals) and Lenovo (5 deals).
What are the case studies in Quantum Computing? The report first considers the case of the well-known quantum company: Zapata Computing, a company that builds quantum-ready applications for enterprise deployment. Their quantum platform Orquestra(R), combines a powerful software platform and quantum algorithm libraries to bring advances in computational power for applications, such as in chemistry, machine learning, and optimization. Examples of optimization in healthcare include patient treatment matching and priority scheduling of doctors and therapies; molecular structure analysis by combinatorial optimization; protein design using unconstrained discrete optimization (DPI report).
The list goes on with Menten AI, which unites synthetic biology, machine learning, and quantum computing to create new proteins not found in nature for diverse applications in the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. The following graph shows the 4 steps of the hybrid quantum-classical approach followed by Menten AI.
AI and quantum-powered protein design at Menten AI.
Quantum-powered design includes:
quantum optimization
search all possible sequences
more accurate designs with more designable positions
scalable to larger proteins
ML-guided simulation includes:
deep learning for filtering
discard designs with poor binding enthalpy, physically unrealistic features, low folding propensity.
Next on the list is XTalPi, an American-Chinese pharmaceutical firm, dedicated to empowering pharmaceutical and scientific research by developing next-generation algorithm-based technologies that enable molecular modeling with enhanced accuracy, reliability, and efficiency. The company uses artificial intelligence and computing to accelerate the development of new drugs with its Intelligent Digital Drug Discovery and Development (ID4) platform. They have raised $319 million round C investments from SoftBank Vision Fund 2i, PICC Capital and Morningside, Tencent (top 10 company in pharma deals), Sequoia China, China Life, and SIG.
XTalPi offers cloud-based AI services and solutions that empower therapeutic research and other pharma companies to address their challenges in drug discovery.
XTalPi activities and research (DPI report).
PolarisQB is another quantum company listed in the report, that provides a platform for drug design, accelerating research by using quantum computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and personalized medicine.
Some other quantum key players identified by the DPI's report are:
Boehringer Ingelheim (Google's partner for R&D optimization by applying quantum computations for precise and systematic Big Data analysis), Kuano (AI/Biotech Hybrid, combining quantum and AI to accelerate drug discovery), Cambridge Quantum Computing (which has secured $45 million in funding from a group of investors in quantum computing software and applications), Riverlane (a quantum computing spin-out from the University of Cambridge, which has raised $20 million in a Series A fundraising round led by Draper Esprit), QULAB, and Entos.
Quantum key players in pharmaceutics (DPI report).
Conclusions
Even though quantum computing is not a fully matured technology yet, its applications in different industries are already tangible. The reports and insights of CompTIA, McKinsey & Company, and Deep Pharma Intelligence list it as a technology with growing implications and effects in various directions, not only on different industries but also on other technologies, such as machine learning and AI. It is described as a cross-cutting tech, with high industrial applicability, already drawing a lot of venture money and generating a growing number of patent filings each year.
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