Towards Drug Design on Quantum Computers

Quantum computers have come a long way in the last decades, going from mere novelty experiments in a scientific lab to large scale industrial efforts aiming to build a machine that can tackle problems that are currently intractable by classical computers. The selection of the types of problems where we can expect an advantage of going from classical to quantum is still modest - drug design is usually among the selected few with industrial relevance where quantum computers are trying to make a difference. Here we take stock of the current state of the field: What problems can already be translated to a quantum algorithm that scales favourably over current classical methods and what further research is needed to make the dream of quantum computers helping the development of a new treatment a reality.