Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN and IBM Team Advance to Finals for 2026 ACM Gordon Bell Prize

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Quantum computing's theoretical advantage for drug discovery rests on its ability to model quantum mechanical systems classical computers cannot handle at biological scale. This team has moved that promise into concrete territory. Using IBM Quantum Heron processors at Cleveland Clinic and RIKEN, paired with Fugaku and Miyabi-G supercomputers, they computed the electronic structure of two large protein complexes at 12,635-atom scale. The quantum components ran up to 94 qubits executing ~6,000 quantum operations per problem segment; classical supercomputers reassembled the full molecular representation. The method -- sample-based quantum diagonalization from IBM and RIKEN, combined with embedded wavefunction methods adapted by Cleveland Clinic -- was first published in Science Advances in May 2026. In under a year the team scaled their approach roughly 40x while achieving 210x improvement in accuracy. The 2026 ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalist designation is one of the most prestigious honors in high-performance computing; the winner is announced at SC26 in Chicago on November 15-20, 2026. For AI practitioners, this milestone matters: quantum-classical hybrid methods at protein scale could reshape drug discovery pipelines within the coming decade.