Wellcome Sanger Institute chooses Quantinuum for genomics revolution

It was 25 years ago that scientists accomplished a task likened to a biological moonshot: the sequencing of the entire human genome – led globally by The Sanger Institute.

The Human Genome Project revealed a complete human blueprint comprising around three 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, Quantinuum reveals.

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, the company says.

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 Sanger's bold search for new computational paradigms, and in particular, quantum computing.

The Wellcome Leap Quantum for Bio (Q4Bio) challenge is pioneering this new frontier. The programme 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,” The Wellcome Sanger Institute said in July.

Earlier this year, the Sanger Institute selected Quantinuum as a technology partner in their bid to succeed in the Q4Bio challenge.

The firm's 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.

Rajeeb Hazra, President and CEO of Quantinuum, said: “We were honoured 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.”

At the heart of this endeavour, 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.

The seeds of the Quantinuum-Sanger Institute collaboration were sown in Cambridge at a round table on responsible computing staged in October 2024, hosted by Quantinuum and Business Weekly.

Quantinuum, whose $10 billion valuation was confirmed today sponsored the groundbreaking event which was held at the headquarters of law firm Mills & Reeve in Cambridge. The Sanger Institute unveiled its infant plans at that stage and superchip giant Arm talked about compute power with responsibility at the round table which was graced by Cambridge and Oxford University academics and corporate trailblazers.