Quantum Resources Required for Binding Affinity Calculations of Amyloid beta

Abstract

Amyloid beta, an intrinsically disordered protein, plays a seemingly important but not well-understood role in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease. A key feature of amyloid beta, which could lead to potential therapeutic intervention pathways, is its binding affinity to certain metal centers, like iron and copper. Numerically calculating such binding affinities is a computationally challenging task, involving strongly correlated metal centers. A key bottleneck in understanding the binding affinity is obtaining estimates of the ground state energy. Quantum computers have the potential to accelerate such calculations but it is important to understand the quantum resources required. In this work, we detail a computational workflow for binding affinity calculations for amyloid beta utilizing quantum algorithms, providing estimated quantum resources required, at both the logical and hardware level.