Case Study: Moderna advances mRNA medicine development with IBM Quantum

Moderna and IBM Quantum are working toward a quantum-enabled biotechnology pipeline

Moderna, a leading mRNA medicines and vaccines company, needed a way to overcome the limits of classical computing in designing and optimizing mRNA sequences. Working with IBM Quantum, Moderna explored quantum computing to help solve the complex challenge of predicting mRNA secondary structure and finding stable, effective nucleotide sequences.

IBM helped Moderna apply CVaR-based variational quantum algorithms and related quantum optimization methods to the problem. The collaboration produced record-scale results, including quantum simulations with up to 80 qubits and mRNA sequence lengths up to 60 nucleotides, and later work scaling to 156 qubits and 950 non-local gates. The IBM partnership showed that quantum methods can match commercial classical solvers and could become part of a near-term quantum-enabled biotechnology pipeline.

Moderna

Alexey Galda

Associate Scientific Director, Quantum Algorithms and Applications