A packed crowd of University of Chicago alumni recently gathered for a Harper Lecture to learn about a revolution in quantum technology poised to radically change patient care.
UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and Chemistry Department Prof. Greg Engel, UChicago Medicine Prof. Julian Solway, UChicago Medicine Assoc. Prof. Alexander Pearson and UChicago PME Dean Nadya Mason took part in a recent panel discussion on the future of quantum medicine, a bold scientific field that merges quantum technology with biology to transform the future of health care.
“You will probably never know that your drug was designed with a quantum algorithm, but you’ll know that it works quite well,” Engel told the group. “You may not know how we developed the immunoengineering techniques to help your body recognize cancer, but you’ll have heard somewhere that someone was able to watch what was going on in your cells.”
The Harper Lecture series is geared toward stimulating conversation on critical topics for UChicago alums and the UChicago community.
“We are excited to see everyone here today to talk about the interrelationship between quantum, biology, and medicine, and how we are combining them in new ways to develop novel technologies and make exciting discoveries,” said Mason, who moderated the panel talk.
Engel and Solway are co-directors of the groundbreaking new Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine, recently established with a generous $21 million donation from philanthropist Thea Berggren. The Berggren Center will focus on advancing the science, developing novel medical technologies, and educating doctors and scientists at all levels.
“The approaches and daily routines of basic scientists and physicians are widely different, but the goals are all the same,” Solway said. “That’s the unifying and beautiful part of our field, that everybody is trying to make the world better.”
Turning flaws to advantages
The qubits that serve as the building blocks for any quantum device are hyper-sensitive to their surroundings. This makes quantum computers delicate, fickle things, but also create ideal sensors to take precise readings from inside living cells.
“You take what was a flaw and turn it into an advantage,” Engel said. “Quantum sensing for biology marries some of the world’s most sensitive metrology with some of the world’s most complex living systems.”
Quantum sensing, a major area of research the Berggren Center will explore, offers a new view into how life works at the smallest levels.
“You see things you can never see before,” Engel said. “You’re developing new ways to see what a cell is doing, how they’re talking, how you become more than the sum of the parts, how your cells work together and communicate. And then in some circumstances, you see disease and you can begin to understand what’s wrong.”
Earlier diagnosis and detection of disease and cancer cells are just one potential benefit.
“They will allow us more granular, faster, higher resolution output make decisions on behalf of patients,” Pearson said. “So this might be in the development of a sensor that can, with cell-level resolution, understand the properties of the cell so my colleagues in the surgical suite know whether they resected enough of a tumor or not. Or it might be using quantum computing to build a better, more effective medicine.”
Doctors and physicists
The University of Chicago has already been working to bring health and qubits together. Pearson, for example, is working with UChicago PME and Department of Computer Science faculty to develop what could potentially be the first quantum biomarker for cancer and, separately, with UChicago PME immunoengineering and quantum faculty to develop quantum-enabled identifiers that will allow for the investigation of individual immune cells in real time.
“The promise of quantum is both to enable brand new sensing of things that we couldn’t sense previously, but also using quantum approaches to do things faster, better, cheaper and at scale that wasn’t previously possible” Solway said.
But to get there, the Berggren Center must entangle two very different “particles” – physicists and medical doctors.
“They speak different languages. They’re very different cultures. They’re different styles,” Engel said. “But when you take a young student, you put them in a lab between these different principal investigators and they grow up there, they feel like they’re a full member of both spaces. They’re translators, and those students are the ones who bring the ideas back and forth.”
After advancing the science and developing this new workforce, the Berggren Center has a third goal – adoption. That means not just building new tools, but getting them to doctors’ offices and ERs in a safe and equitable manner.
“We’re going to be able to reduce disparities if we’re able to use new tools to improve the care of many people,” Pearson said. “It sometimes takes expensive investment in order to come up with cheaper solutions to human health problems.”