Academic medical center Cleveland Clinic today installed the first quantum computer in the world that is uniquely dedicated to health care research – IBM's Quantum System One. It’s also the first on-site IBM-managed quantum computer for the private sector in the United States.

Cleveland Clinic unveiled the quantum computer in the Lerner Research Institute on its main campus in Cleveland. IBM Fellow and Director of Quantum Infrastructure Jerry Chow noted the company’s quantum computer can be deployed in different environments, and typical research institutes have the ability to meet the environmental requirements.

“The IBM team has installed multiple IBM Quantum System Ones under different environmental conditions,” Chow told SDxCentral in response to questions. “We must consider various environmental and infrastructure factors, such as electricity connections and access to water, during the installation process. We can work with various combinations of these factors, but all must be taken into consideration.”

“The biggest element to work through is usually installing the infrastructure to support a dilution refrigerator and the room temperature electronics. Even these are well within the reach of the typical research institution,” he added.

At their core, quantum computers use superconductive circuits to create “artificial qubits” on a chip made of niobium or superconductive aluminum. Superconductivity is a set of properties that include the elimination of all electrical resistance and magnetic flux fields, meaning that an electric current can flow through it indefinitely. This is important because resistance would dissipate energy and destroy quantum information.

However, to make this possible, superconductors need to be cooled to a critical temperature that is barely above absolute zero.

Cleveland Clinic called this installation “a key milestone” of its 10-year Discovery Accelerator partnership that is focused on advancing biomedical research through the use of high-performance computing (HPC), quantum computing, and artificial intelligence (AI).

It “blends the complementary skills of two world-class organizations – Cleveland Clinic’s expertise in specialized clinical and surgical care and biomedical research and IBM’s longstanding global leadership in developing advanced computing technologies and data-analysis tools,” Cleveland Clinic Chief Research Information Officer Lara Jehi explained to SDxCentral in an email.

Jehi noted that quantum computing development can help screen and optimize drugs targeted to specific proteins and improve the quantum-enhanced prediction model for cardiovascular risk following non-cardiac surgery.

Similar to many highly sought-after computing tools, researchers wait in line to have access to quantum computers. That’s why Cleveland Clinic decided to install a quantum computer on site to allow its researchers to have easier access and faster results, Jehi noted.

“We decided to have this technology on site as it provides our team the ability to tap into these new computational spaces that could help researchers discover new medicines and treatments more quickly,” she said. “Currently, there are numerous scientific inquiries waiting in queues to be used on shared quantum computers via the cloud. By having our own dedicated on-premises system, our researchers' experiments take priority and, if successful, we get answers more quickly."

She expects the quantum computing use cases will be broadened beyond medical research.

“As quantum computing continues to be integrated into life-science applications there is promise of using it as an optimization tool,” Jehi wrote. “The impact to the clinical space would result in possible optimization of clinical trial planning, scheduling algorithm of clinical personnel, and/or health care finances since it is being used by other industries to optimize finances (e.g. banking).”

Photo: IBM Quantum System One at Cleveland Clinic. Source: IBM