Moderna and IBM Quantum are working toward a quantum-enabled biotechnology pipeline.
Moderna is a leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology company. A pioneer in messenger RNA (mRNA) medicines and vaccines, it uses mRNA molecules that play a crucial role in the body to treat and prevent diseases. Today, Moderna is exploring the application of quantum computing in the design of mRNA medicines through a research and technology partnership with IBM.
The human body contains more than 100,000 types of proteins, and each protein is derived from mRNA. For decades, scientists have known that mRNA has the potential to form the basis of a new class of medicines that could address illnesses at the most fundamental level of cellular function. Moderna has been a leader in putting that insight into action.
The company has used mRNA technology to instruct cells to produce proteins that could help prevent or treat diseases that were previously considered untreatable.
While classical computers are powerful tools in the development of mRNA, they have limitations when tackling computationally intensive problems. Quantum computing offers a promising new approach to these challenges, complementing classical methods where current algorithms reach their limits.
A key challenge for Moderna is developing the mRNA technology instructions that will accurately instruct the body on how to make the proteins that can treat diseases. For any given protein, there is an astronomically large number of possible mRNA sequences that could encode it, making optimization a complex task.
To address a medical problem with mRNA, researchers begin by identifying the biological mechanisms involved in a disease and determining which protein could modulate that process. Then, they identify a nucleotide sequence that encodes that protein. In addition to encoding the protein, researchers must ensure the sequence is stable in the body. They must also ensure it can be produced in sufficient quantities to be effective, without triggering an unwanted immune response. This requires a deep understanding of cellular chemistry, as well as substantial computing power, to sift through the millions of possible nucleotide sequences to find the right one.
Moderna has a fast, scalable approach to this molecular chemistry work, but the company is always looking for ways to improve the process of developing mRNA medicines. This drive has led Moderna to develop its quantum computing expertise now, while the technology stands on the threshold of useful applications.
“Our goal is to improve human health,” said Alexey Galda, Associate Scientific Director, Quantum Algorithms and Applications at Moderna. “We believe it's critical to explore every available tool—including quantum computing—to scale our progress today, rather than wait for the technology to fully mature in the future.”
To predict how an mRNA molecule will behave in the body, it's critical to understand its secondary structure—the pattern of internal attraction between nucleotides that causes the RNA strand to fold into stems, loops and bulges. These structures influence how efficiently the mRNA is translated into protein, how stable it is and how it interacts with cellular machinery.
Each mRNA sequence can, in theory, fold into an astronomically large number of secondary structures, though only a fraction of them are plausible given the physical laws governing molecular behavior. In practice, the molecule tends to adopt the structure with the lowest free energy, its most stable conformation under physiological conditions. Predicting this structure involves solving a complex combinatorial optimization problem, making it ideal for quantum-enhanced algorithms.
IBM enterprise partners are exploring possible applications for variational quantum algorithms (VQAs)—a class of algorithms for near-term quantum applications research—in industries ranging from finance to aerospace. Research on VQAs and other heuristic algorithms is exciting because the algorithms may deliver quantum advantage, before the arrival of next-generation quantum computing technologies such as error correction.
Moderna and IBM researchers used Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR), a risk-assessment technique used in finance, to improve the performance of VQAs and to find optimal solutions to complex optimization problems. CVaR helps investors assess the tail risk of a portfolio, to estimate the possible loss of investment in worst-case scenarios. In quantum computing, CVaR focuses the optimization process on the lower tail of the energy distribution, effectively targeting the most promising solutions. CVaR mitigates variance by focusing the optimization on the lowest-energy portion of the measurement distribution, effectively steering the classical optimizer toward more promising solutions while reducing sensitivity to noisy outliers. Because CVaR operates as a lightweight classical post-processing step, it can enhance VQAs without adding significant computational overhead.
The low computational overhead of CVaR is a key advantage. While IBM works to suppress noise at the hardware level—with improved architectures such as the IBM Quantum® Heron processor that offers lower error rates—additional error mitigation techniques are still often required. These techniques involve dedicating quantum and classical resources to characterizing and correcting for noise effects, which can reduce the compute available for solving the actual scientific problem. CVaR-based VQAs help reduce this burden by efficiently focusing on high-quality measurement outcomes using lightweight classical processing, enabling the use of more system capacity for meaningful computation.
Right now, quantum computers are scaling rapidly and becoming more robust against noise. We have entered the era of quantum utility, where quantum computers can deliver reliable results at a scale beyond classical brute force approximation methods for certain problems. Jay Gambetta, Vice President of IBM Quantum, expects that the world will see the first examples of quantum advantage by 2026, provided that the quantum and high-performance computing communities work together to adopt the technology. And one route to quantum advantage is refining and improving heuristic methods. Moderna has worked with IBM to pursue this path by making VQAs more practical, because they understand there is opportunity in being among the first to embrace an emerging technology.
“We embrace new technology early because we would rather understand it on our terms than play catch-up later,” said Wade Davis, Senior Vice President, Digital at Moderna. “Collaborating with IBM gave us the opportunity to see what this quantum approach could do, rather than waiting for it to show up and then have to rush to understand it.”
The joint Moderna–IBM Research® team has achieved impressive results, and it is now exploring quantum approaches to secondary structure prediction. In a 2024 paper published in the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering, they demonstrated a quantum approach that could match the results of commercial classical solvers for combinatorial optimization problems.
In their research, the Moderna–IBM team applied CVAR-based VQAs to the mRNA secondary structure prediction problem. The result was one of the largest and most advanced VQA executions ever realized on quantum hardware—and a demonstration of the real potential of quantum computing in aiding in Moderna's research.
In 2024, this work reached a record-setting scale for a quantum secondary structure simulation, involving up to 80 qubits and mRNA sequence lengths up to 60 nucleotides. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no one had ever simulated sequences of even 42 nucleotides on a quantum computer.
In work that will be published later in 2025, the researchers applied the same methodology to problem sizes of up to 156 qubits involving 950 non-local gates, a measure of circuit complexity. They also presented a new approach to this sort of problem, called instantaneous quantum polynomial (IQP) circuit-based quantum optimization. This sampling-based approach, similar to CVaR-based VQAs, allows for the most efficient use of quantum and classical resources in a joint quantum high-performance computing (HPC) environment.
Envisioning a near-term quantum-enabled biotechnology pipeline
Moderna’s end goal is not to replace classical computing with quantum methods but to build a near-term quantum-enabled biotechnology pipeline. “Very often people only think of quantum outperforming classical. That's not necessarily the goal. It's also valuable if your quantum tool can offer you a more diverse set of solutions—a more diverse set of molecules to generate and go test in the wet lab,” Galda said. “Having this additional tool with its own very specific qualities is extremely valuable for the computational problems that are core bottlenecks in our workflow. I think the most realistic scenario is that quantum will augment our classical computation and offer certain advantages in certain areas.”
IBM envisions classical and quantum methods working together to solve the most important problems facing society and business. Quantum-centric supercomputing works to divide problems between quantum and classical architectures, with each augmenting the other’s ability to rapidly deliver results to once unsolvable problems. The IBM–Moderna team is focused on quantum-centric approaches to the secondary structure problem at even larger scales.
“Working with IBM,” Davis said, “offered an opportunity to partner with a company with a track record of delivering important research results. And in the field of quantum computing, it was important that IBM had a clear roadmap for developing the technology and a track record of hitting milestones on that roadmap.”
As quantum computing scales, Moderna wants to be ready to use it to deliver the greatest possible impact to people through mRNA medicines.
Founded in 2010, Moderna works at the intersection of science, technology and health to create mRNA medicines at unprecedented speed and efficiency. Through the advancement of mRNA technology, Moderna is reimagining how medicines are made and transforming how we treat and prevent diseases for everyone. The company developed one of the earliest and most effective COVID-19 vaccines—Spikevax—and a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine. Moderna's mRNA platform has enabled the development of therapeutics and vaccines for infectious diseases, immuno-oncology, rare diseases and autoimmune diseases. With a unique culture and a global team driven by the Moderna values and mindsets to responsibly change the future of human health, the company strives to deliver the greatest possible impact to people through mRNA medicines.
Legal
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2025. IBM, the IBM logo, IBM Quantum, and IBM Research are trademarks or registered trademarks of IBM Corp., in the U.S. and/or other countries.
Examples presented as illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.