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
Quentir Medicine Monitor
Evidence-based insights for quantum medicine.
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.
BC World Pharm Announced on 1 September 2026 That It Was Selected With Qunova Computing to Target Pan-Beta-Lactamase and Penicillin-Binding Proteins
Quentir Medicine Monitor
Evidence-based insights for quantum medicine.
An infectious disease physician facing a resistant Gram-negative infection chooses among a small number of remaining drugs. The reason the number is small is chemical. Bacteria carrying beta-lactamase enzymes cut the beta-lactam ring before the antibiotic reaches the protein it was meant to block. One clinical strategy has been to pair the antibiotic with an inhibitor that protects it, and that strategy keeps running out because the approved inhibitors do not cover every enzyme.
On 1 September 2026 BC World Pharm announced that it had been selected as lead research institution for a Korean government project intending to find compounds that hit pan-beta-lactamase and penicillin-binding proteins at the same time, with Qunova Computing, a quantum computer based computational chemistry company, as co-research institution. The cited announcements state no budget or project term, and no ministry award record was reachable during this reading.
The two targets do different jobs. Penicillin-binding proteins build the bacterial cell wall and are what every beta-lactam antibiotic is aimed at. Beta-lactamases are the defense the bacterium evolved against exactly that, and they fall into four Ambler classes, three of which cut with a serine residue while class B uses zinc. Hamrick and colleagues place clavulanic acid and tazobactam mainly against class A, describe avibactam as reaching classes A, C and D, and report that no inhibitor approved as of 2020 covered both the clinically important serine enzymes and the metallo enzymes. Their own subject, taniborbactam, reached all four classes with one documented exception, IMP-1. Those limits sit alongside the World Health Organization's priority pathogens list of May 2024, which puts carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales in its critical group.
Qunova Computing was founded in 2021 by a KAIST professor and is based in Daejeon; the company reports that its HI-VQE algorithm has run quantum chemistry problems at qubit counts up to 68 and sits in IBM's Qiskit functions catalog. The announcement describes AI and quantum mechanics based multi-target design without identifying a method, a backend or a hardware result, and quantum mechanics based design is also standard vocabulary for classical quantum chemistry, which limits what can be inferred about quantum-hardware involvement. This is the second reported Korean selection in a week pairing a pharmaceutical company with a computational drug-design company, after D&D Pharmatech and Quantum Intelligence on 28 August, and the two run under different ministry instruments.