Curia's September 2026 Report Asks HM Treasury for a Five-Year NHS Program in AI, Data and Quantum, With Quantum Sensing for Diagnostics First
Quentir Medicine Monitor
Evidence-based insights for quantum medicine. Published by Quentir Systems LLC · October 20, 2026.
Any innovator who has tried to sell a new diagnostic to the NHS knows the first obstacle is finding the door. Lord Kamall, who served as the UK's minister for technology, innovation and life sciences, opens Curia's new report with exactly that memory: start-ups knocking at primary care, at hospital trusts and at integrated care systems, with some getting in and others giving up and taking their product abroad.
The report, AI, Data, and Quantum in UK Healthcare: From Evidence to Investment, was published by the policy group Curia in September 2026 and written with HM Treasury as its first reader. It grew out of a parliamentary roundtable hosted by Lord Kamall, now Shadow Minister for Health and Social Care, and chaired by Professor Gillian Leng, former chief executive of NICE and president of the Royal Society of Medicine. Speakers included Lawrence Tallon, chief executive of the MHRA; Sir Peter Knight, who chairs the strategy advisory board of the UK's national quantum technologies program; Roger McKinlay, chair of UKQuantum; Michael Cuthbert, director of the NQCC, the UK's national laboratory for quantum computing; Nicola Hodson of IBM UK and Ireland; and Lara Jehi of Cleveland Clinic, who joined online.
Its central request is a five-year national program that treats AI, health data, classical computing and quantum technology as one capability organized around named NHS problems. The ordering inside that capability is the part a hospital buyer should notice first. The report puts quantum sensing for imaging and diagnostics ahead of quantum computing in time, and it calls data quality the foundation everything else depends on.
Politics UK summarized the report on 20 October 2026. Curia stresses in its own text that the roundtable was a "light-touch expert affirmation and challenge" of its direction, and that participants did not endorse the program design or the recommendations, which Curia developed afterwards from the discussion and published evidence.
That caveat matters for how the document should be read. It is an investment case written by a policy group, informed by senior people from the regulator, the national quantum program and industry, and it carries their themes without carrying their signatures.
What Curia asks HM Treasury to fund over five years, phase by phase
The proposed program runs in five phases. Months 0 to 6 would set up governance, a capability map, the Treasury business case and the first choice of use cases. Months 6 to 18 would build and benchmark: data readiness, prototypes, infrastructure access, and regulatory and technical testing. Months 18 to 36 would move into controlled NHS deployment with procurement and implementation support. Months 36 to 48 would scale the models that worked, and months 48 to 60 would close with an independent evaluation and a decision on the next decade.
Curia lists what public money should pay for: shared infrastructure and secure access, data readiness and interoperability, regulatory capability and sandboxes, NHS implementation support and early procurement, skills, independent evaluation and post-quantum transition planning. Industry would carry product engineering and commercial growth. The success test is concrete: at least three healthcare applications moved beyond pilot stage into sustained NHS procurement or deployment, with unsuccessful results and decisions to stop projects published alongside the successes.
The report argues that grants alone have produced companies whose main skill is winning the next grant. McKinlay described how the UKRI Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund moved from collaborative grants toward larger projects and procurement, and the report cites £312 million across 263 projects between 2018 and 2025, followed by about £1.3 billion of co-investment. The published PDF still carries an editor's note asking for these figures to be checked against the final UKRI evaluation before publication, so they are best treated as provisional.
Quantum pillar: sensing and computing. Technology readiness: not applicable. The report is a policy and investment proposal, and it describes no single device or algorithm whose maturity could be placed on the readiness ladder.
Why the report puts quantum sensing for brain imaging and diagnostics ahead of quantum computing
Knight and McKinlay both warned the room against treating quantum technology as a synonym for quantum computing. Quantum sensors detect extremely small physical changes, and the report names brain imaging, oncology and histopathology as fields with nearer-term applications. The argument for clinical value rests on fidelity: better sensitivity could reduce false negatives, and better specificity could reduce false positives that use up scarce clinic capacity. Curia adds that these gains would have to be shown inside real care pathways, including their effect on later tests, treatment and outcomes.
Britain already has a nearby example. The Monitor followed Siloton's £8.4 million Innovate UK contract to trial a chip-based handheld eye scanner with Sunderland Eye Hospital. Innovate UK pays for the development work through a contracts program in which public bodies set the problem, and the hospital is the clinical-trial partner. Neither is buying the device for routine care. The award is a development contract, which makes it an analogy for the pre-procurement route Curia wants repeated across a small portfolio of sensing demonstrators. As that post noted, the quantum label there follows the funding line, and the company has not described a distinct quantum sensing mechanism in the scanner.
On computing, the report asks for realism. Participants separated today's prototype machines from a utility-scale, fault-tolerant computer, and Curia warns government against over-claiming near-term clinical impact or picking one hardware platform early. The NQCC keeps a portfolio across several modalities. Rare disease research, molecular modeling and complex scheduling are named as areas worth evaluating with hybrid methods.
What MHRA chief executive Lawrence Tallon said about regulating devices that change after launch
Tallon argued that complaints about regulation often bundle formal product rules together with procurement, bureaucracy, workforce pressure and organizational risk appetite, and that each barrier should be handled on its own terms. For genuinely novel products, the report describes a move from one very high barrier toward a sequence of proportionate hurdles: an entry threshold, then real-world surveillance, controlled test beds and clear conditions for wider use.
Curia goes further than the roundtable here. It wants surveillance to last for the whole working life of an AI-enabled or hybrid system, because models, data, clinical pathways and user behavior keep shifting after deployment. It also wants assurance to cover the developer, the clinician and the deploying hospital as well as the product, on the reasoning that a capable tool can be unsafe in an organization without monitoring or trained staff. The MHRA already runs AI Airlock, its regulatory sandbox for AI-enabled medical devices, and the report asks for that kind of test bed to extend to quantum-enabled technologies.
Where health data and post-quantum cryptography fit: NCSC's 2028, 2031 and 2035 dates
The roundtable named persistent problems with metadata, interoperability and fragmented secure data environments, and the report states plainly that advanced computing cannot make up for poorly governed data. It leaves the choice between centralized and federated data models open, noting that the answer may differ by use case and risk.
On security, Curia asks health and research organizations to find the cryptographic systems that a future quantum computer could break, and to prioritize long-lived sensitive data. Patient records fit that description, since they stay sensitive for decades. The post-quantum migration timeline of the NCSC, the UK's national cyber security authority, sets target dates: discovery and assessment complete by 2028, the highest-priority migrations by 2031, and full migration to post-quantum cryptography by 2035. The report's practical point is that infrastructure built under the program should plan for those targets from the start, to reduce the risk of costly retrofits later.
Who paid for the report, and what NHS trusts and suppliers can take from it in 2026
The report says it was funded in part by Cleveland Clinic Philanthropy, with content contributed by Cleveland Clinic and Cleveland Clinic London, and it proposes Cleveland Clinic London as a UK translation partner for early clinical evaluation. Curia states that it kept full editorial control, and the report says sponsorship should never decide use-case selection or findings. Readers can weigh the translation-partner chapter with that funding in view.
For an NHS trust, the useful content is the sequence of investment. Sensing demonstrators with a defined clinical pathway come first, data readiness runs alongside them, and quantum computing stays in evaluation until benchmarks justify more. Other countries are writing similar plans; the Dutch government-wide quantum strategy of 5 October 2026 came without new money, which shows how far a strategy document can sit from a funded program. Curia's proposal has the same open question. Whether the Treasury funds any part of it will decide if the five phases ever start.
Sources
Primary source: Curia, AI, Data, and Quantum in UK Healthcare: From Evidence to Investment, September 2026, informed by a parliamentary roundtable hosted by Lord Kamall and chaired by Professor Gillian Leng. Also drawn on: Politics UK's report of 20 October 2026, the post-quantum migration timelines of the UK's NCSC, the MHRA's AI Airlock collection page, and earlier Quentir coverage. The readiness rating is the Monitor's editorial assessment.