KRIBB and Quandela Signed a Memorandum in Paris During Meetings on 7 and 8 September 2026 to Apply Photonic Quantum Computing to Drug-Candidate Discovery

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During meetings in Paris on 7 and 8 September 2026, the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology signed three memoranda of understanding, one of them with Quandela, the photonic quantum computing company founded in 2017 on research from CNRS and Université Paris-Saclay. KRIBB announced the agreements on 10 September, and the Korean daily Herald Economy carried the institute's account the same day. The signing took place during President Lee Jae-myung's state visit to France; on 8 September, Korea's science ministry and France's economy ministry exchanged a government-level memorandum on artificial intelligence, semiconductors and quantum technology at the Élysée.

The KRIBB and Quandela agreement has one stated purpose: to combine artificial intelligence and quantum computing with biological research so that finding a drug candidate takes less time and money than it does today. KRIBB puts the usual time to discover a candidate at more than ten years. The public announcement does not disclose a molecule, a disease target, a budget or a delivery date, and Quandela's own product pages describe the two machines it documents in use, Lucy at the French national computing center TGCC and Belenos in its cloud, as 12-qubit photonic machines. Read together, those two facts set the honest expectation for this partnership: a research collaboration at the stage of a signed memorandum, with no demonstrated pipeline benefit yet and no published plan for producing one.