IonQ and Kipu Quantum's 64-Qubit Protein-Folding Paper Took Third Place at IEEE Quantum Week 2026: Six Peptides, 46 to 61 Qubits, Four of Six Reference Energies Reached After Classical Post-Processing

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A Kipu Quantum and IonQ paper on lattice protein folding took third place in the hybrid case-studies track at IEEE Quantum Week 2026 in Toronto, IonQ announced on 15 September 2026, and the release says the work "was used to improve computational speed and accuracy in drug discovery." The paper, on arXiv since 29 April 2026, reports something narrower: a hardware benchmark on six short peptides that reached the reference energy of a conventional solver in four cases, and only with the help of a classical consensus step.

The experiment ran six peptides of 14 to 16 residues through a 64-qubit trapped-ion processor, a barium development system IonQ describes as similar to its forthcoming Tempo line, folding each on a coarse lattice with no side chains using 46 to 61 qubits. The quantum circuits produced samples that mostly violated the backbone geometry, and it took a classical post-processing step, a consensus vote over the two thousand lowest-energy samples combined with a pool of feasible backbones, to reach the reference energy in four of the six cases; a random-start version of the same pipeline reached it in one. For a hospital buyer or a clinical pharmacologist that is the whole result: a hardware run on a benchmark, at a scale that a classical genetic algorithm solves to convergence, with the quantum contribution visible in the statistics of one part of the problem.

The IonQ release counts 857 submissions and 27 Best Paper honors at the conference, four of which went to papers with IonQ authors. Three of the four concern AI fine-tuning, distributed optimization with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and NVIDIA, and linear algebra with Synopsys. The fourth is the protein-folding paper with Kipu Quantum, which the release assigns to drug discovery. The conference's award list gives the paper third place in the Quantum End-to-End Hybrid Case Studies track, with the paper presented on Monday 14 September and the track's awards presented on Tuesday 15 September. Five of the fourteen authors are at Kipu Quantum in Berlin, one, Sebastián Romero, at ICMM-CSIC and the Autonomous University of Madrid, and eight at IonQ, among them Martin Roetteler, IonQ's vice president of quantum applications research, who is quoted in the release. The award recognizes a conference paper; it does not evaluate a drug, a target or a clinical claim, and the paper makes none.