Roche taps into quantum computing software for Alzheimer’s disease research

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Alzheimer’s disease has proven to be stubbornly difficult to unravel, but Roche aims to tap into a new tool that promises to accelerate the process: the quantum computer.  Through a multi-year partnership with the U.K.’s Cambridge Quantum Computing, the Swiss drugmaker’s task force plans to explore the nascent technology’s potential for designing and delivering new therapeutic compounds.  The partnership follows a similar endeavor launched earlier this year between Google and Boehringer Ingelheim, which plans to staff its own quantum laboratory as part of the Big Pharma’s digital transformation. Google has also been developing its own quantum hardware, in the Sycamore processor, which it says has outperformed so-called “classical” supercomputers. While typical machines use the binary system of 1s and 0s to solve...