Sergii Strelchuk contributes to world first in quantum computing and genomics

Associate Professor Sergii Strelchuk has helped to achieve a world first: loading a complete genome onto a quantum computer

Quantum Genomics

Researchers have long sought to harness the potential of quantum computing for scientific discovery. Unlike classical computers, which process information as binary bits, quantum computers use qubits that can exist in multiple states simultaneously, allowing certain types of calculations to be explored far more efficiently.

However, current quantum systems remain highly sensitive and error-prone. Qubits are easily disrupted by noise and interference, making reliable large-scale computation extremely difficult. A major challenge for the field is demonstrating that today’s quantum hardware can still produce meaningful results for real-world scientific problems despite these limitations.

Genomics is one area where researchers believe quantum computing could eventually prove valuable. Modern genomic research increasingly relies on analysing vast collections of genetic data to understand disease pathways, population-level variation and biological processes. These datasets can become extraordinarily large and computationally demanding.

Quantum for Bio

To explore how quantum computers might eventually address challenges in genomics and public health more broadly, Wellcome Leap launched the Quantum for Bio (Q4Bio) programme - a 30-month, $50 million international challenge programme designed to test whether useful biological and healthcare algorithms can be realised on current and emerging quantum hardware. The programme has now concluded. Six teams reached the final phase, including the Quantum Pangenomics team led by Associate Professor Sergii Strelchuk at Oxford.

Wellcome Leap defined two prize levels. A $2 million prize was available for teams that could demonstrate an experimental realisation of their application on a quantum computer with more than 50 qubits, program depth of O(10³–10⁴), and a clear path to scaling. A $5 million grand prize was reserved for a still more demanding demonstration: an application running at substantially greater scale, within the programme’s target resource range of around 100–200 qubits and depth O(10⁵–10⁷), and demonstrating quantum advantage over best-in-class classical baselines. On 16 April 2026, Wellcome Leap announced that the $2 million prize had been awarded to Algorithmiq, working with IBM and Cleveland Clinic, for an end-to-end hybrid quantum-classical workflow relevant to photodynamic cancer therapy. No team received the $5 million grand prize, reflecting the fact that the hardware and algorithmic requirements for that higher threshold remain beyond current systems.

Associate Professor Sergii Strelchuk, together with researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, led one of the six finalist teams. The collaboration has now succeeded in loading the genome of the hepatitis D virus onto a quantum computer for the first time.

Loading a genome onto a quantum computer

The genome of hepatitis D contains around 1,700 bases of RNA, making it compact while still representing a complete real-world genome. The team selected this viral genome because it offered a manageable starting point for developing and testing methods to compress genomic data into quantum states. They were able to encode the hepatitis D genome using 117 qubits.

Successfully loading the data onto IBM’s 156-qubit Heron processor required the researchers to create new approaches for representing genomic information within the constraints of current quantum hardware. The challenge lies in how information is represented inside a quantum system. Unlike classical bits, qubits can exist in superpositions and can become entangled, meaning the behaviour of a multi-qubit system depends on correlations across many qubits rather than on each qubit separately. This gives quantum computers a very large space in which to carry out computations. However, quantum computers do not simply act as exponentially larger memory devices: the information must be encoded in a form that can be prepared, manipulated and meaningfully measured. For genomic data, the key challenge is therefore not only to compress the sequence, but to encode it in a way that preserves biologically relevant structure for future quantum algorithms.

In practice, however, loading genomic data onto a quantum computer is far from straightforward. Rather than simply transferring a sequence of DNA letters into the system, the genome first had to be converted into a suitable structure that could be represented on quantum hardware. The team then had to design the precise sequence of operations needed to prepare this state on a real quantum processor.

This was not just a data-loading exercise. The real challenge was to turn a biological sequence into quantum instructions that today’s hardware could actually run. That is what makes the result significant: it moves quantum genomics from a conceptual possibility towards an executable workflow Sergii Strelchuk

While loading the hepatitis D virus genome represents the team’s latest headline achievement, the researchers have also demonstrated all four of the project’s original objectives on real quantum hardware: data encoding, sequence alignment, pangenome assembly and phylogenetic tree construction. Several research papers describing this work have already been released, with further publications expected.

Looking ahead, the researchers believe the platform they have developed could help tackle some of the most computationally challenging problems in human health, including metagenomics and antimicrobial resistance. Longer term, they hope these approaches could contribute to understanding chromothripsis - a cancer mechanism in which chromosomes are shattered and incorrectly reassembled - an area of significant complexity that classical computational methods have so far struggled to address.

About Wellcome Leap

Wellcome Leap builds and executes bold, unconventional programs, funded at scale. Programs that aim to deliver breakthroughs in human health over 5 – 10 years. Founded by the Wellcome Trust in 2020 as a US nonprofit, Leap programs target complex human health challenges with the goal of achieving breakthrough scientific and technological solutions. Operating at the intersection of life sciences and engineering, Leap programs require best-in-class, multi-disciplinary, global teams assembled from universities, companies, and nonprofits working together to solve problems that they cannot solve alone.