Sagutxoa Grows Neurons From Donated Milk Teeth in Alicante and Plans a Quantum Analysis on IBM's Quantum System Two in San Sebastián (El País, 18 September 2026)
Quentir Medicine Monitor
Evidence-based insights for quantum medicine.
On 18 September 2026 El País reported from the Basque Country on Sagutxoa, a research project that grows human neurons from the milk teeth of children with rare neurological diseases and intends to send the measurements taken on those neurons to a quantum computer. The neuroscience half of the project has produced something concrete: a public biobank of more than 50 frozen neuronal lines. The quantum half is a plan with access to the machine through a public regional program; the reports describe no quantum hardware result.
The project is led by Salvador Martínez, professor at the Universidad Miguel Hernández and researcher at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante, and is financed by the Bilbao foundation The Walk On Project with an initial budget of 120,000 euros. Its raw material is milk teeth donated by children with rare neurodegenerative diseases; the dental pulp contains neural crest progenitors that become neurons without genetic modification. The computing partner is LKS Next of the Mondragón group, which expects to use the IBM Quantum System Two installed in San Sebastián through the Basque Government's Basque Quantum infrastructure.
For a hospital neurologist or a rare-disease foundation the interesting part is the biology, which is further along than the headline suggests, and the honest part is the timeline: the foundation's president says the phase now under way should reach its first conclusions in about a year, and warns against raising false expectations.
Martínez told El País that the first task was to establish whether the pulp of a shed milk tooth contains neural crest progenitors, and that the answer was yes. The stem cells in the pulp turn into neurons naturally, without any genetic reprogramming, which is the point of difference from induced pluripotent stem cell models that rewrite a skin or blood cell's program first. In culture, he says, the neurons behave as neurons do: they form circuits, connect to one another and develop synapses, which produces very large volumes of electrophysiological, proteomic and transcriptomic data.
IIT Roorkee, 2 September 2026: A Fluorescent-Protein Spin Qubit Six to Eight Orders Short of Neural Nitric Oxide
Quentir Medicine Monitor
Evidence-based insights for quantum medicine.
An individual nitric oxide molecule diffuses about two nanometers in roughly 0.2 nanoseconds, which makes the signal close to its point of production exceptionally transient. The methods available today each miss that measurement in a different way: a microelectrode cannot be placed with nanometer precision, a small-molecule indicator disturbs the redox chemistry it is there to report, and neither reads the radical's own magnetism. On 2 September 2026 five researchers at three Indian institutes published the calculation that says how far one new class of protein sensor sits from doing that job.
The preprint, posted to arXiv as 2609.02792 by Parul Raghuvanshi, Sagnik Ganguly, Sharika E, Mohana Priya T. and Vishvendra S. Poonia of IIT Roorkee, IIEST Shibpur and IIT (ISM) Dhanbad, works out the detection limit for spin relaxometry with the fluorescent-protein spin qubit. Their verdict on the sensor as it exists today is that it misses physiological concentrations of nitric oxide by six to eight orders of magnitude. The bottleneck they identify is the qubit's own relaxation time, which is set by the vibrations of the protein that houses it.
What Feder and colleagues published in Nature on 20 August 2025: a spin-1 qubit inside enhanced yellow fluorescent protein
The object this calculation is about was demonstrated last year. Jacob Feder, Benjamin Soloway and their co-authors reported in Nature 645, 73 (2025) that enhanced yellow fluorescent protein hosts an optically addressable spin-1 qubit in the metastable triplet state of its chromophore. The qubit is initialized by 488 nanometer light through spin-selective intersystem crossing, driven by microwaves, and read out through optically activated delayed fluorescence, in which a 912 nanometer pulse lifts the triplet through a higher triplet state back into the singlet manifold. The delayed light that comes back is separated in time from prompt autofluorescence, so the emission carries the spin state.
Its Hamiltonian is a spin-1 with zero-field splitting, measured at D of 2.356 gigahertz and E of 0.458 gigahertz, which puts three zero-field magnetic resonance lines at roughly 0.92, 1.90 and 2.81 gigahertz. The property that matters for medicine is not spectroscopic. Because the sensor is a protein, a cell can be instructed to build it, and it can be fused to a chosen partner protein. That places the sensor spin within the three-nanometer barrel of an enzyme that makes the very radical one wants to measure. This Monitor read the wider case for cells that grow their own quantum sensors on 26 August 2026; the paper now under discussion is the first hard test of whether the idea survives contact with numbers.