Tecnun's Synthetic Myelodysplastic-Syndrome Patients Were Seven-Bit Samples From IBM's ibm_basquecountry

Quentir Medicine Monitor

Evidence-based insights for quantum medicine.

The SintraREV trial randomized 61 patients. It ran from 15 February 2010 to 21 February 2018 across 22 university hospitals in Spain, France and Germany, and eight years of enrollment for 61 people is what a phase 3 study costs in a rare blood cancer. A preprint posted on 28 August 2026 takes the data from that trial and asks whether a quantum computer can generate synthetic patients good enough to stand alongside them.

Olatz Sanz Larrarte and nine co-authors published "A quantum generative model for in silico clinical trials using scarce training datasets" on arXiv on 28 August 2026, accepted for the proceedings of the CIBB 2026 conference. The author list crosses two worlds. Sanz Larrarte, Reza Dastbasteh, Pedro Crespo Bofill and Josu Etxezarreta Martinez work in the Department of Basic Sciences at Tecnun, the University of Navarra engineering school in San Sebastián. María Díez-Campelo of the hematology department at Hospital Universitario de Salamanca led SintraREV itself. Felipe Prosper and Ana Alfonso-Piérola practice at the Clínica Universidad de Navarra, Mikel Hernaez and Roberto Sanchez-Navarro sit at CIMA and DATAI in Pamplona, and Sara Capponi is at IBM Research in San Jose. The circuits ran on ibm_basquecountry, the 156-qubit Heron r2 processor in Donostia-San Sebastián.

Practical takeaway. The synthetic patients this pipeline produces are seven-bit strings. Sex, age, hemoglobin, platelets, neutrophils, treatment assignment and survival are each reduced to a single yes-or-no value, and the quantum processor samples from a distribution over those 128 possible patients. The fitting step that classical generative models spend hundreds of training epochs on happens on a classical computer before the quantum machine is touched.