Signal IBM quantum protein simulation / Microsoft & Quantinuum quantum error correction in Nature (800x logical qubits)

Summary

Researchers from Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN and IBM simulated a 12,635-atom protein complex (Trypsin, immersed in water), the largest heterogeneous quantum-classical electronic-structure calculation to date, using a new EWF-TrimSQD algorithm published around 5 May 2026. Two IBM Heron r2 processors (156 qubits each) performed quantum sampling using up to 94 qubits, running 9,200 circuits over 100 hours and collecting 1.3 billion measurement outcomes, paired with the Fugaku and Miyabi-G classical supercomputers in Japan. The team reported roughly a 40-fold increase in simulation size and up to a 210-fold improvement in accuracy within six months, achieved just four months after first modeling a 303-atom miniprotein. IBM's own blog noted the method does not yet outperform the best classical approaches for protein electronic structure. Separately, Microsoft and Quantinuum's quantum error correction results were peer-reviewed and published in Nature on 10 June 2026, showing logical error-rate improvements from 11x up to 800x versus physical-qubit baselines, with a Bell-state preparation error rate cut from about 0.8% to 0.001%. The results, first announced in April 2024, still involve a small number of logical qubits and do not constitute a fault-tolerant quantum computer.