IonQ Speeds Quantum-Accelerated Drug Development Application in Partnership With AstraZeneca, AWS And NVIDIA

Insider Brief

• IonQ, AstraZeneca, AWS, and NVIDIA have demonstrated a quantum-accelerated drug discovery workflow that significantly reduces simulation time for a key pharmaceutical reaction.
• The hybrid system, integrating IonQ’s Forte quantum processor with NVIDIA CUDA-Q and AWS infrastructure, achieved over a 20-fold improvement in time-to-solution for the Suzuki-Miyaura reaction.
• The results will be presented at the ISC High Performance conference, highlighting the potential for quantum computing to speed up early-stage drug development and other scientific applications.

IonQ has announced the results of a collaborative quantum computing project that could accelerate pharmaceutical research timelines by orders of magnitude. The company, working with AstraZeneca, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and NVIDIA, developed a quantum-enhanced workflow that slashes the time needed to simulate a key chemical reaction commonly used in drug development, according to a statement from the company.

The results, set to be presented at the ISC High Performance conference in Hamburg, showcase how hybrid quantum-classical systems can reduce the computational burden of early-stage drug discovery. In a demonstration centered on the Suzuki-Miyaura reaction — a widely used method for synthesizing small-molecule pharmaceuticals — the team reported more than a 20-fold improvement in time-to-solution compared to previous methods.

“This demonstration with AstraZeneca represents a meaningful step toward practical quantum computing applications in chemistry and materials science and showcases how IonQ’s enterprise-grade quantum computers are uniquely suited to meet the challenge,” Niccolo de Masi, CEO of IonQ, said in the statement. “The ability to model catalytic reactions with speed and accuracy isn’t just a scientific achievement, it’s a preview of how hybrid computing with quantum acceleration will provide revolutionary capabilities to the industry.”

IonQ Forte, NVIDIA CUDA-Q and Amazon Braket Integration

The breakthrough was achieved by integrating IonQ’s Forte quantum processor with NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q platform, using Amazon Braket and AWS ParallelCluster to coordinate classical and quantum resources. The Suzuki-Miyaura reaction, often modeled for its complexity and industrial relevance, typically requires high-fidelity simulations that can take weeks or even months on conventional computers. The new hybrid system cut the projected runtime to just days while maintaining scientific accuracy, according to IonQ’s announcement.

“We are turning months into days,” said de Masi, in an interview. “And in computational drug discovery, turning months into days can save lives — and it is going to change the world.”

The pharmaceutical industry has long recognized the potential of computational chemistry to predict molecular behavior before laboratory testing. But traditional approaches struggle with certain molecular interactions that scale poorly with system size. Quantum computers — particularly when combined with high-performance classical systems — offer a potential path around those limitations. By accelerating simulations of reaction steps, such workflows could help researchers narrow down viable drug candidates earlier in the discovery pipeline.

de Masi added that this he considers this an inflection point — and just the beginning of using quantum computing and hybrid quantum computing to deliver life-saving treatments to market faster, more accurately and more efficiently. He said expects the “double exponential” power of quantum computing to bring about even more profound changes in drug discovery.

“With the systems we have now, IonQ Forte, which has 36 qubits, we are already demonstrating narrow commercial advantage, so just imagine the double exponential power of next generation systems with hundreds of millions of qubits.”

Broader Applications

Drug development may be just one of many industrial applications, according to IonQ.

IonQ frames the result as a proof-of-concept for a broader class of applications across healthcare, chemistry, and materials science. The company emphasized that its work with AstraZeneca and its technology integration with AWS and NVIDIA point to an emerging ecosystem around quantum-enhanced research tools. As pharmaceutical companies look for ways to shorten the multi-year, multi-billion-dollar process of bringing new drugs to market, techniques that reduce early-stage bottlenecks are likely to receive growing attention.

The announcement is the latest in a string of efforts by IonQ to demonstrate commercial use cases for quantum computing. As quantum computing continues to develop, the company has positioned itself as an early mover in combining quantum hardware with cloud-based platforms and high-performance computing frameworks. The ISC presentation is expected to highlight how collaborations across the computing and pharmaceutical sectors are beginning to translate theoretical quantum advantages into measurable time and cost savings.

“This collaboration marks an important step towards accurately modeling activation barriers for catalyzed reactions relevant to route optimizing in drug development. We look forward to further advancements in the area,” said Anders Broo, Executive Director, Pharmaceutical Science, R&D, AstraZeneca.

“Future quantum computers are not going to replace traditional compute, but instead accelerate specific, computationally intensive processing steps as part of HPC processing pipelines,” said Eric Kessler, GM of Amazon Braket at AWS. “By combining quantum computers on Amazon Braket with scalable GPU resources on AWS, we’re supporting AstraZeneca to envision how future quantum computers will be used to accelerate research in computational chemistry.”

“Bringing together state-of-the-art quantum and GPU computing in hybrid workflows is the path to realizing quantum’s potential,” said Tim Costa, Senior Director of Quantum and CUDA-X at NVIDIA. “This work represents a meaningful step towards applying quantum accelerated supercomputing to important use cases.”

For more information on this research, please visit the IonQ booth #A25 at the ISC High Performance conference in Hamburg, Germany on June 10-13, 2025 or read the full research paper at our technical blog post.