How Yonsei plans quantum drug discovery on IBM Quantum Nighthawk r2 in Songdo

Quentir Medicine Monitor

Evidence-based insights for quantum medicine.

Yonsei University put a new processor into its IBM quantum computer at the Songdo International Campus in Incheon and showed it to the press on 4 November 2026. The machine now runs on IBM Quantum Nighthawk r2, and the university says it will use the system to cut years from the early, computational stages of drug development.

The time targets came from Chung Jae-ho, head of Yonsei's quantum initiative, at a media briefing in Songdo. As Digital Daily reported on 4 November, he described algorithms that would shorten the target protein search from one to two years to five months, and the search for a compound and its optimization into a drug candidate from four years to two. The Seoul Economic Daily account of the same day presents both figures as goals of a pipeline that combines quantum algorithms with artificial intelligence, and quotes Chung expecting a speed gain of 40 to 50 percent over AI algorithms that industry uses as standard.

For a hospital or pharmaceutical reader, the useful part of the briefing is how carefully Chung drew the boundary of quantum drug discovery. He put the usual length of drug development at about 15 years and said that the last seven to eight, the clinical trials, are not something faster computation can shorten. Yonsei's work concentrates on the stages before any patient is involved: finding the protein that drives a disease and finding a molecule that acts on it.

Yonsei installed Korea's first IBM Quantum System One in 2024, built around a 127-qubit Eagle processor. Chung called the two years since then "season 1" and the upgrade "season 2." According to Seoul Economic Daily, this is the first Nighthawk processor installed in an outside institution's own facility.

IBM introduced the design in its announcement of 12 November 2025: 120 qubits linked by 218 tunable couplers, each qubit connected to up to four nearest neighbors in a square lattice, with circuits of up to 5,000 two-qubit gates at launch. On the Eagle chip each qubit reaches two or three neighbors. Better connectivity matters because qubits that are not directly linked need extra operations to exchange information, and every extra operation adds error.

Yonsei describes the chip as having 458 physical qubits. Digital Daily explains the count: 120 programmable qubits that run circuits, 218 couplers and 120 reset elements. The 120 computing qubits are physical qubits without error correction, so they are a different unit from the logical qubits that a fault-tolerant machine would use. IBM plans to expand beyond 500 programmable qubits, connect several processors past 1,000 qubits, and build a large error-corrected computer by 2029.