Infleqtion advances to Phase 3 of Q4Bio quantum challenge for oncology

Infleqtion has been selected to advance to Phase 3 of the Wellcome Leap Quantum for Bio Challenge. The quantum software team, working with researchers at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will demonstrate quantum-enabled biomarker discovery for precision oncology. The selection includes Wellcome Leap program funding and moves the project to final-stage demonstrations on real quantum processors. Infleqtion is preparing to go public through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp X. Pranav Gokhale, chief technology officer at Infleqtion, said phase 3 allows the team to test quantum-enabled biomarker discovery end to end. The hybrid quantum classical workflow will be applied to real oncology data to evaluate whether quantum methods can improve feature selection on current hardware. Gokhale added that the project succeeds because clinicians, biologists and quantum scientists design the solution together. This collaboration ensures the algorithms address clinical needs while remaining feasible on near-term quantum hardware. In phase 3 the team will forecast treatment response in head and neck cancer using a curated cohort from the University of Chicago. The effort builds on phases one and two that produced preprocessing steps for DNA, RNA and pathology image features along with a higher-order optimization method and the Hyper-RQAOA quantum routine. The announcement follows release of the team's research paper titled Toward Quantum-Enabled Biomarker Discovery: An Outlook from Q4Bio. The paper is available on arXiv.