Quantum Leap: Helsinki Startup Wins $2M for Cancer Drug Discovery

Jan de Vries · 2026-04-17

A small quantum software company from Helsinki just pulled off something big. Algorithmiq walked away as the sole winner of a $2 million prize from Wellcome Leap, a U.S. nonprofit backed by the Wellcome Trust. The award wasn't just for showing up—it was for proving that quantum computing can actually help discover new cancer drugs. ### What Did They Actually Win? The prize came from Wellcome Leap's Quantum for Bio (Q4Bio) challenge, a 2.5-year, $50 million program that pushed research teams worldwide to show real-world applications of quantum computing in biology and healthcare. Algorithmiq was the only team to deliver. The company built a quantum computing framework that met three tough requirements: it could run on today's hardware, it tackled biologically meaningful problems, and it outperformed classical methods under realistic conditions. That's no small feat.  ### Why This Matters for Drug Discovery Here's the thing about quantum computing in drug development—lots of people have talked about it, but few have shown it works for real problems. Algorithmiq did exactly that. They used their end-to-end quantum-classical workflow on IBM hardware, simulating the activation pathway of a photosensitiser drug currently in Phase II clinical trials. The simulation ran on up to 100 qubits, which is impressive for a practical application.  ### The Team Behind the Breakthrough Algorithmiq was founded in 2020 by Dr. Sabrina Maniscalco, Guillermo Garcia-Perez, Matteo Rossi, and Boris Sokolov. The company focuses on making quantum computers useful for chemistry, materials science, and life sciences. For the Q4Bio challenge, they teamed up with IBM for quantum computing support and the Cleveland Clinic for biological expertise. Dr. Maniscalco led the project alongside Dr. Ivano Tavernelli from IBM and Dr. Vijay Krishna from the Cleveland Clinic. ### How It Works: Photodynamic Therapy The winning work centered on photodynamic therapy (PDT), a cancer treatment that uses light-activated drugs to target and destroy tumor cells. Compared to traditional treatments, PDT causes fewer harmful side effects. The problem? Finding new photosensitisers for PDT has been slow because reliable data is hard to come by. Algorithmiq's team showed they could efficiently generate that data and feed it into an active learning AI loop to create novel drug candidates. ### What the CEO Says Dr. Sabrina Maniscalco, CEO and co-founder of Algorithmiq, put it plainly: "Algorithmiq is the first, and the only team in Q4Bio, to deliver a scalable end-to-end computational framework that combines quantum computing and AI for real therapeutic problems, demonstrated on up to 100 qubits. It shows that quantum computing can already tackle scientifically meaningful drug-development questions under real hardware constraints." ### The Bigger Picture This isn't just about one company or one prize. It's a signal that quantum computing is moving from theoretical promise to practical impact. The challenge now is to keep scaling these methods and proving they can accelerate drug discovery at a meaningful scale. For now, Algorithmiq has shown that quantum computing can deliver value for real-world drug development—not just abstract benchmarks. That's a quantum leap worth paying attention to.