“We advised Fujitsu to enter the market with the right partners, moving away from the idea of owning the whole proposition. “Like some of the more agile corporates, Fujitsu is shifting from the assumption that it needs to build everything in-house,” says Matthieu Vallin, Senior Manager at Sia Partners. Polarisqb represented a perfect example of a start-up that offered complementary skills and technology, enabling each partner to collaborate in an agile and efficient way. “The traditional approach involves screening thousands of candidate molecules to identify which might be suitable for testing, whereas we can screen trillions in a smaller timeframe by adopting new technologies, such as chemistry and machine-learning algorithms as well as quantum-inspired computing,” explains Shahar Keinan, CEO & Founder of Polarisqb.“However, full quantum computing is not mature enough at this point, so we needed to find partners with the right capability, which brought us to Fujitsu through the introduction from the healthcare team at Sia Partners.” Fujitsu had engaged Sia Partners to find suitable partners to leverage its quantum-inspired Digital Annealer. Current library searching solutions are only capable of reviewing up to a few tens of millions of molecules and the existing process takes at least two years. However, there is an almost infinite number of molecules to assess, and only a small number of these molecules will bind with the protein - finding the right one is like looking for a single star in a whole galaxy. Early stages of the drug discovery process involve the identification of small molecules which can block these proteins by binding to them. Disease-causing pathogens often contain specific proteins that are responsible for spreading the infection blocking these proteins is the key to stopping the disease. If both the speed and accuracy could be improved simultaneously, the ability to develop new medicine more rapidly to combat new viral pandemics would soar. This combination creates a high level of business risk if new drugs fail to get market approval from government health agencies. As has become painfully clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, the development of new drugs is not only hugely expensive, it is also extremely time-consuming.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |