Analysis: Quantum Medicine’s Promise Raises New Privacy And Governance Risks

Insider BriefQuantum technology could compress drug discovery times and sharpen diagnostics, but without new governance standards it may also erode medical privacy and widen inequality, according to a new analysis in Bill of Health, the blog of the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard Law School.Mauritz Kop, founder of Stanford Responsible Quantum Technology and a senior fellow and principal investigator at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, writes that medicine is approaching what he calls a “Hippocratic Quantum” moment. As quantum computing, sensing and simulation move from laboratory tools to clinical infrastructure, he writes, traditional medical ethics must be translated into technical and legal safeguards suited to a world where encryption can be broken and personal inference becomes permanent.“Quantum technology is increasingly described as the telescope of the 21st century: a scientific instrument that expands what humans can observe, simulate, and engineer,” Kop writes. “In biomedicine, quantum computing, simulation, sensing, and imaging promise to compress discovery timelines and sharpen diagnostics. In the near term, the most plausible gains stem from hybrid quantum-classical computational chemistry for drug discovery, specifically de novo design and lead optimization that can be rigorously benchmarked against classical baselines.But Kop warns that ethical governance, not technical feasibility, will define the pace and direction of adoption.Kop frames his approach around the four pillars of biomedical ethics: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. Quantum tools do not replace those principles, they change what it takes to apply them.Autonomy, traditionally grounded in informed consent, becomes more complex in a world of detailed digital replicas of patients — sometimes called digital twins — that can generate probabilistic forecasts about disease and treatment response. When quantum-enhanced artificial intelligence systems generate highly granular predictions, clinical decision-making risks sliding into what Kop calls “algorithmic determinism,” in which treatment paths appear pre-decided.To preserve autonomy, patients must have data sovereignty, limits on secondary use of their information and a credible “right not to know” certain predictive results, according to Kop.Beneficence — the duty to act in the patient’s best interest — is strengthened by quantum-informed discovery. Quantum chemistry can explore molecular reaction pathways and binding behaviors that classical machines struggle to calculate, including hypotheses related to neurodegenerative diseases and the blood-brain barrier. But simulated insight alone does not satisfy the ethical standard. Findings must be rigorously benchmarked against classical methods and validated in the lab before translation to patients.Non-maleficence, the obligation to do no harm, now extends to digital biosecurity. A powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm — a mathematical procedure that can factor large numbers efficiently — could eventually break widely used public-key encryption methods. That creates what security experts call a “harvest now, decrypt later” risk: adversaries may collect encrypted health or genomic data today and decrypt it once quantum capability matures.Justice, finally, requires confronting what Kop describes as a looming “quantum divide.” Early quantum capacity will be concentrated in well-funded institutions and nations with access to specialized hardware and scarce expertise. Ethical evaluation should ask whether efficiency gains in clinical trials and drug screening ultimately broaden patient access or entrench exclusion, according to Kop.Kop writes that ethical commitments must become standards of care, not abstract aspirations.First, migration to post-quantum cryptography should become a clinical baseline. Post-quantum cryptography, or PQC, refers to new encryption methods designed to withstand attacks from future quantum computers. Health systems should inventory their cryptographic dependencies, prioritize long-lived data repositories such as biobanks and migrate in staged, crypto-agile ways. Procurement contracts, he suggests, can require vendors to demonstrate post-quantum roadmaps and testing.He also points to privacy-enhancing techniques such as blind or delegated quantum computing, which could allow hospitals to use remote quantum hardware without exposing sensitive patient data to operators.Second, institutions must treat the integrity and provenance of the patient file as co-equal with confidentiality. Quantum sensing and imaging could amplify identity inference risks by extracting more detailed biological information. At the same time, quantum-secure systems could make medical records so tightly protected that correcting or challenging them becomes harder.A Hippocratic approach treats these capabilities as clinical and human rights questions, not merely engineering upgrades, Kop suggests. Governance should require robust audit trails and strict access controls, while designing identity systems for contestability and bounded use.Third, pharmaceutical and medical-device developers should adopt explicit discovery governance. Quantum simulation makes the most sense when it helps cut down on time in the physical lab — for example, by screening promising molecules and modeling how they might behave in the body before animal testing begins. But any claims about its performance still need to be carefully checked against traditional methods and real-world experimental data.Kop proposes a Quantum Impact Assessment, essentially an ex ante safety checklist documenting validation criteria, model limits, dual-use risks, ethics, intellectual property and security planning before clinical translation. As lab-on-a-chip technologies miniaturize early validation, he cautions against premature claims that simulated or micro-scale results can substitute for established clinical standards.The convergence of quantum computing and artificial intelligence creates what Kop calls a pronounced dual-use domain. The same simulation tools that accelerate therapeutic discovery could also lower barriers to engineering harmful pathogens.He advocates dual-use governance that includes export-control compliance and resilience planning for critical mineral supply chains. Drawing on work at Stanford Responsible Quantum Technology and CIGI, he supports a Least-trade-restrictive, Security-sufficient, Innovation-preserving test. Under that framework, validated performance claims can be published or patented, while sensitive quantum parameterizations or tacit knowledge that could accelerate harm are restricted through trade secrets or secrecy orders.As regulatory frameworks mature, Kop notes the possibility that a European Quantum Act could establish global baselines through what policy analysts call the Brussels Effect. U.S. innovators should build interoperability and standardized reporting early to ensure that hybrid computational chemistry and toxicity simulation benchmarks remain comparable across jurisdictions.Kop concludes by calling for what he describes as a “quantum constitution” for medicine: prompt migration to quantum-safe cryptography; robust data sovereignty and bounded secondary use for digital twins; human oversight in quantum diagnostic loops; and dual-use safety documentation informed by his LSI test.“If quantum technology is a telescope, ethics and governance determine where it is pointed — and whether it heals rather than harms,” writes Kop. “The biomedical community can meet the quantum age with disciplined governance that treats privacy, identity, and human agency as prerequisites for innovation, thereby operationalizing autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice for quantum medicine.”Read the entire post here.Share this article:Keep track of everything going on in the Quantum Technology Market.In one place.