The Q-MONSTAR consortium: advancing fault-tolerant quantum computing for precision oncology

We present the Q-MONSTAR (Quantum-MONSTAR) from SCRUM-Japan, an academic–industry consortium established to verify the potential of quantum computing and develop fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) applications in cancer treatment. SCRUM-Japan is a nationwide large-scale, industry–academia cancer genome screening project, coordinated by the National Cancer Center Japan.

To our knowledge, Q-MONSTAR represents one of the first global proof-of-concept platforms for FTQC embedded within an ongoing clinical research infrastructure that leverages large-scale clinically validated multi-omics data. Advances in precision oncology have necessitated a molecular-level understanding of cancer biology 1 .

However, many central problems — including protein conformational dynamics, accurate prediction of quantum effects in drug binding, and the combinatorial complexity of genomic mutations — remain computationally intractable for conventional high-performance computing (HPC). For example, exact quantum-mechanical calculations of the binding free energy between cancer-related proteins and small-molecule compounds are estimated to require computational times that far exceed the practical limits of HPCs (over 1,000 years) 2 .

These computational barriers impede the realization of accurate precision oncology and effective drug discovery. Liu, J., Ma, H., Shang, H., Li, Z.

& Yang, J.