Quantum Applications, Drug Discovery

Shionogi wins quantum drug-design prize with D-Wave’s help

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October 29, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Shionogi & Co., Ltd. secured first place in the Quality of Life category of the NEDO Challenge, earning a ¥40 million prize to further its quantum-assisted drug discovery research, D-Wave says. Published in Scientific Reports this July, the award-winning work integrated D-Wave’s annealing quantum computing technology into an AI model for molecular design, achieving 97% chemically valid molecular representations, a 24-percentage-point increase over classical models. “We believe that combining quantum computing with AI has the potential to accelerate scientific progress,” said D-Wave CEO Dr. Alan Baratz.

Shionogi and D-Wave Win NEDO Prize for Drug Discovery

Shionogi achieved a 97 percent rate of chemically valid molecular representations using a quantum-assisted model, a 24-percentage-point improvement over the 73 percent validity attained by a comparable classical model. This advance, central to their first-place win in the NEDO Challenge’s Quality of Life category, demonstrates the potential of annealing quantum computing to refine generative AI outputs for initial drug discovery stages, according to D-Wave.

The research, conducted in collaboration with D-Wave Quantum, also revealed a higher proportion of molecules exhibiting strong drug-likeness scores when compared to both the classical model and the original training dataset. The ¥40 million prize awarded by NEDO, Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, will directly support Shionogi’s ongoing investigations into applying quantum computing to the complex task of designing new drug candidates.

This work builds on broader research combining D-Wave’s quantum computing capabilities with classical high-performance computing to both generate and rigorously evaluate potential molecules. Dr. Kunugi added, “Our research combines quantum computing and high-performance computing to generate and evaluate drug candidate molecules, and we hope this work will ultimately contribute to faster development of new medicines for the patients we serve.” D-Wave CEO Dr.

We believe that combining quantum computing with AI has the potential to accelerate scientific progress and open new paths to solving some of the world’s most consequential problems.

Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave
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Avatar of Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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