Quantum Sensing for Biomedical Applications

Biomedical sensing faces challenges ranging from biological, physical, and chemical complexity and noisy environments to regulatory requirements and clinical implementation. Quantum sensing offers several compelling solutions to these challenges that could provide important benefits over classical tools. The location and noise often associated with biomedical measuring — for example, sensing tissue deep in the body, surrounded by veins and nerve endings — make accurate measurements difficult. Tools that do exist are often invasive, expensive, and rigid, and/or require a lot of physical space. For example, superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) can take measurements with very high sensitivity but they are expensive; require ultra-low temperatures and magnetic shielding, resulting in a large footprint; and have little flexibility in form factor. Supplementing or replacing classical sensors with new quantum sensors that overcome some of these limitations could have significant implications for treatment availability and improve medical outcomes.

Improved sensors could impact diverse aspects of biomedicine. For example, quantum sensors offer the possibility of significantly more efficient and accurate medical diagnoses for patients, thanks to their increased sensitivity and novel options for form factor. These attributes could enable quantum sensors to collect vast amounts of data about patients and medical conditions, and thus facilitate drug and treatment development and earlier diagnosis of disease. The advantages of quantum sensors encourage new ideas about solutions, quantum use cases, and business models across the biomedical industry — from prenatal care to cancer detection and treatment.

Several types of quantum sensors have high potential for biomedical applications and innovation, including optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs), optical frequency combs, and nanodiamonds with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers. High-feasibility, high-impact use cases for these and other quantum sensors include

  • subcellular imaging,
  • brain imaging,
  • maternal and fetal imaging,
  • tissue oxygenation imaging,
  • systemic disease detection,
  • biophoton detection for disease diagnostics, and
  • microbiome analysis.

This report describes the limitations and advantages of both existing and developing quantum sensors, reviews the process for developing and commercializing quantum sensors for biomedical applications, and explores in detail the potential use cases listed above. Additionally, it offers three recommendations for developing quantum sensors that are readily usable in biomedical applications:

  1. Increase collaboration between quantum sensor developers and end users: There are clear limitations to sensors currently used in the biomedical field, and quantum sensors can play an important role in addressing them. However, to do so, quantum sensor developers must be aware of these use cases and their unique needs. There are many ways to increase awareness and initiate collaboration between the developers and the clinicians who would use the sensors. For example, quantum sensor experts should proactively reach out to clinicians by participating in their conferences and meetings, such as those hosted by the American Medical Association, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and the Medical Device Manufacturers Association. QED-C could reach out to conference organizers and offer to host special sessions at which quantum sensor developers share information about the instruments they are developing and hear insights from the clinicians present.

Another option to spur collaboration across sectors is for federal funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to require proposing teams include investigators from multiple disciplines, sectors, or stakeholder communities. For example, NSF’s Convergence Accelerator program requires project teams to include researchers from a mix of disciplines and sectors. This type of requirement for research grants would force developers to consider the clinicians’ needs from the start and help ensure that the sensor developed as part of the grant is practical and useful for the end user community. Additionally, including clinicians in the development and commercialization process could reduce reluctance in the healthcare industry to adopt new technology. Participating clinicians would understand how quantum sensors work and the benefits they offer to healthcare and could spread the word to their colleagues and advocate to their clinic administrators.

  1. Establish incubation and collaborative labs for testing: The lack of testbeds across the quantum community makes it difficult to evaluate the performance of quantum sensors and identify their advantages over their classical counterparts. Sensor testing equipment can be prohibitively expensive and is not available to many research groups or small/startup businesses. Quantum sensor innovation would be enabled by establishing one or more incubators or user facilities with shared instrumentation and other components with which the sensor must interoperate. Such facilities would support research by and promote interaction among physicists, engineers, biologists, clinicians, regulatory scientists, and data scientists. This would likely lead to organic cross-sector collaboration on R&D. Such a testbed could be established at existing national labs, such as those owned by NIH or Department of Energy, or at university research centers that are available for use by external researchers.
  2. Fund high-impact, high-feasibility biomedical research: Federal agencies and venture capital firms funding biomedical research should consider the use cases detailed in this report as high priorities for the quantum sensor and biomedical communities. For example, research support for the development of robust, useful OPMs could have benefits for a variety of healthcare applications, including brain and fetal imaging. Similarly, small business funding for quantum sensor startups could support knowledge sharing and foster partnerships that would eventually lead to a cross-sector, multidisciplinary project team.