Quantum simulation company raises cash to speed drug discovery

QSimulate, a quantum simulation software company focused on drug discovery and materials science, has completed a seed financing round led by Embark Ventures that brings its total funding to $11 million. The Boston-based firm also released the newest generation of its quantum-powered simulation platform.QSimulate was founded in 2019 by two theoretical chemists, Toru Shiozaki, then of Northwestern University, and Garnet Chan, then of the California Institute of Technology. The pair set out to bridge the gap between computational methods developed in academia and the tools needed by the pharmaceutical industry for fast drug development.Simulating interactions between drugs and proteins is one of the most difficult steps in drug development, says Shiozaki, who is now QSimulate’s CEO. While artificial intelligence can speed up some parts of the process, AI’s effectiveness in drug discovery is limited by the quality and availability of training data—which is difficult to obtain for complex biological systems, he explains. One solution is getting data through the simulation of quantum interactions: the behavior of atoms and electrons dictated by the laws of quantum mechanics.But simulating quantum interactions between a drug and a protein’s binding site is computationally demanding and time intensive. QSimulate’s program, Quelo, can complete drug discovery simulations in a couple of hours rather than the typical weeks, Shiozaki says. Developed through years of algorithm and software work, it uses graphical processing units that can handle more data than traditional central processing units can.“Basically, we are creating a lot of work typically done in the lab, but