Greg Engel and Julian Solway are building a new field to deliver cutting-edge patient care that requires a level of precision most patients won’t need to understand – and that’s just fine.
“Think of an MRI machine,” said Engel, a professor at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and Chemistry Department. “You may not know that it’s flipping nuclear spins in water and imaging the water in your body, but you know when it catches a tumor early enough that it can be treated. Or that using this technology prevented a painful, expensive exploratory surgery. We want the next generation of quantum healthcare to be similarly patient-friendly and effective.”
Engel and Solway, professor emeritus of medicine at UChicago, are co-directors of the Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine. Created last year through a generous $21 million donation from philanthropist Thea Berggren, the Center represents a groundbreaking approach to applying quantum innovation to human health.
“One of the Berggren Center’s fundamental goals is training a medical workforce to be able to leverage quantum physics,” Solway said. “At the start, we’ll focus on MD/PhD or MD-only students who are interested in quantum systems, so that they can work side-by-side with other PhD quantum scientists in order to develop new devices, diagnostics, and potentially even therapeutics.”
In a Q&A, Engel and Solway discuss how the Berggren Center is melding these two diverse fields to create a new generation of “bilingual scientists” fluent in both.
From the outside, medicine and quantum mechanics might not seem like a natural pairing. What brings these two fields together?
Engel: Quantum science gets a little bit of a strange reputation in the public media, and people like to lean into the philosophy or the science fiction. I want to discard that. It’s much simpler. It’s a mathematical model that we use to represent behaviors of some of the smallest particles that we know. It makes predictions. Some of those predictions are a little counterintuitive, but they have been borne out. Quantum science has proven very successful in helping us understand the world around us. We want to use it to understand the world within us as well.
Solway: Medicine, meanwhile, is fundamentally about solving problems. It’s identifying what’s the health problem, figuring out what’s the best solution, working with the patient, and drawing on everything that the physician and the medical community know. Often, that involves using devices that we don’t really understand completely ourselves. For example, I can’t tell you exactly how a CT scanner creates images of organs deep inside people, but we as doctors know how to interpret these images. With quantum science, quantum sensing, and quantum computing reaching a point where they’re suitable for adding to the medical armamentarium, it’s very natural to be excited about the prospect of quantum medicine.
One of the Berggren Center’s missions is training a new workforce of “bilingual scientists” steeped in both quantum and medical science. Why is that important?
Solway: That’s the same challenge as combining basic science research of any stripe with clinical science and insights. Presently, biological basic scientists often work with clinicians who aren’t biological basic scientists, and to do so effectively they each need to learn the other’s terminology and viewpoints. Collaboration between quantum scientists and clinician scientists is a similar situation, though their respective viewpoints and technical languages may be even further apart. Facilitating their coming together – by learning of each other’s language in a sufficient degree to communicate effectively – is one of the Center’s main goals. And experience shows that one outstanding way to facilitate that coming together is to train individuals to become experts in both fields – hence our focus on supporting MD/PhD and other MD students working in quantum science labs.
Engel: One of the things that we realized was that the people who developed quantum sensing are physicists. They’re interested in setting records for measurements – the finest measurement of a magnetic field or an electric field or temperature. They don’t think about imaging hypoxia or understanding malignant metabolism or seeing when an immune cell triggers. Meanwhile, we have biologists and physicians who desperately want some of that information in order to help patients. Our idea was bringing these communities together and realizing that there was something that they could both add if they could talk to one another.
It turns out, long story short, they can’t – or at least it is hard. They speak different languages. They’re from very different cultures, they have very different styles. But when you take a young student, you put them in a lab between these different PIs and they train 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 from hospital bed to quantum lab.
What technologies are you personally most excited about?
Solway: I would like to detect tissue hypoxia – inadequate oxygenation – throughout the body. Tissue hypoxia plays a very important role in the pathology of lots of diseases, from lung and cardiovascular problems to metabolic disorders and cancer. Being able to visualize oxygen throughout the body using quantum sensor technologies, wow, would that be useful for critical care physicians and for cardiologists and everybody studying disorders in which there isn’t enough blood flow or a disordered metabolism.
Engel: Quantum sensing will let you see things you could never see before. You’re seeing 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, you can begin to understand what’s wrong.
There are applications ex vivo, calculating new molecules or diagnostics in the laboratory, and then there are research tools that let you see biology in a different way so you can begin to understand the problems that you couldn’t even frame, the questions you couldn’t even ask before. And that’s the most exciting part.