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Origins

Quantum Genomics is a startup, founded in 2026 by Sergii Strelchuk and James McCafferty and based in Cambridge, United Kingdom. They set it up to bring together two fields that have developed largely apart, quantum algorithms and genomics at scale.

Before founding the company, Sergii Strelchuk led Human and Pathogen Quantum Pangenomics, a research project supported by Wellcome Leap's Quantum for Bio programme that included researchers from the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Kyiv Academic University and the University of Melbourne. That work asked a specific question: can the hard computational problems in genomics be reformulated so that current quantum computers can address them?

The effective use of genome data is fundamentally computational and is limited by algorithmic complexity. Multiple sequence alignment grows combinatorially, complex regions such as the HLA genes are often left unresolved, and matching against a single reference genome is heuristic and occasionally fragile. Pangenomes, which capture variation across populations, make the matching harder still. These are tasks that demand a great deal of computation and relatively little storage, which makes them a natural fit for quantum computers.

The research behind the company

That research produced four lines of work: pangenome-guided sequence assembly, phylogenetic tree construction, an exact encoding of whole genomes as quantum states, and a compressed encoding of DNA derived from machine learning. Each was run on real hardware from IBM, Quantinuum and IonQ, with quantum annealing on D-Wave systems, at scales beyond 100 qubits.

Open research

All of the research developed during Human and Pathogen Quantum Pangenomics has been published and is freely accessible online: see Published research.

Timeline