A pathogen has the possibility to attack the human body causing diseases or epidemics depending of our defenses. Government and control health organizations have an especial interest in to know what the probability of the human is and a population to be attacked and infected by the pathogens and how it can be influenced by the virulence and concentration of the external agent or substance. In this way, physics has been involved in the solution of the problem giving to the global health institutions a guide to control the disease, by understanding the situation as a quantum phenomenon known as penetration of a potential barrier or as classical diffusion problem which involves the spatial and temporal variation of the concentration of the pathogen that causes the disease. The computations required to the solution of this problem are presented with MAPLE and is expected that this solutions have important implications to the global health care.
A pathogen has the possibility to attack the human body causing diseases or epidemics depending of our defenses. Government and control health organizations have an especial interest in to know what the probability of the human is and a population to be attacked and infected by the pathogens and how it can be influenced by the virulence and concentration of the external agent or substance. In this way, physics has been involved in the solution of the problem giving to the global health institutions a guide to control the disease, by understanding the situation as a quantum phenomenon known as penetration of a potential barrier or as classical diffusion problem which involves the spatial and temporal variation of the concentration of the pathogen that causes the disease. The computations required to the solution of this problem are presented with MAPLE and is expected that this solutions have important implications to the global health care.
Emerging infectious viral diseases are a major threat to humankind on earth, containing emerging and re-emerging pathogenic physiognomies has raised great public health concern. This study aimed at investigating the global prevalence, biological and clinical characteristics of novel Corona-virus, Wuhan China (2019-nCoV), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona-virus (SARS-CoV), and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Corona-virus (MERS-CoV) infection outbreaks [1]. Currently, novel Corona-virus disease COVID-2019 is already pandemic and causing havoc throughout the world. Scientific community is still struggling to come out with concrete therapeutic measures against this disease and development of its vaccine is far off from sight in the immediate near future. However, humanity will be put to such pressures very often in the near future and given the present circumstances, what we can expect from the scientific world now? I think QIT (Quantum Information Theory) has an answer to this question. One of the very basic mechanisms that every infectious virus follows to infect is the entry of the virus through cell surface receptors, engulfing, un-coating of viral genome and its transcription to form multiple copies and translation to form viral proteins and coating of viral genome to form multiple copies of the viral particles and then of course the cell bursting to infect other cells. This very basic mechanism does not occur randomly but through a regulated and more dynamic process which we may call coding and decoding of information through reduction in error or noise.
Effective epidemic control is crucial for mitigating the spread of infectious diseases, particularly when pharmaceutical interventions such as vaccines or treatments are limited. Nonpharmaceutical strategies, including mobility restrictions, are key in reducing transmission rates but require careful optimization to balance public health benefits and socioeconomic costs. Quantum computing is emerging as a powerful tool for solving complex optimization problems that are intractable for classical methods and can thus be leveraged to handle mobility restrictions. This article presents a new approach to optimizing epidemic control strategies using quantum computing techniques. We focus on non-pharmaceutical interventions, particularly mobility restriction, modeled as a discrete-time network epidemic process based on the susceptible-infected-susceptible and sus-ceptible-infected-removed frameworks. The control problem is formulated as a combinatorial optimization task, inherently NPhard due to the binary nature of intervention decisions. To tackle this computational complexity, we derive a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization representation of the control problem, enabling its efficient solution via quantum computing resources. Our methodology is validated through numerical simulations on realistic case studies, showcasing the potential of quantum algorithms for enhancing epidemic control strategies. These findings pave the way for leveraging quantum optimization in broader applications of networked dynamical systems, demonstrating its viability for complex decision-making processes in public health management.
Scientific and technological advances in medicine and systems biology have unequivocally shown that health and disease must be viewed in the context of the interplay among multiple molecular and environmental factors. Understanding the effects of cellular interconnection on disease progression may lead to the identification of novel disease genes and pathways, and hence influence precision diagnostics and therapeutics. To accomplish this goal, the emerging field of network medicine applies network science approaches to investigate disease pathogenesis, integrating information from relevant Omics databases, including protein-protein interaction, correlation-based, gene regulatory, and Bayesian networks. However, this requires analysing and computing large amounts of data. Moreover, if we are to efficiently search for new drugs and new drug combinations, there is a pressing need for computational methods that could allow us to access the immense chemical compound space until now largely unexplored. Finally, at the microscopic level, drug-target chemistry simulation is ultimately a quantum problem, and hence it requires a quantum solution. As we will discuss, quantum computing may be a key ingredient in enabling the full potential of network medicine. We propose to combine network medicine and quantum algorithms in a novel research field, quantum network medicine, to lay the foundations of a new era of disease prevention and drug design.
Biological processes such as photosynthesis, enzymaticcatalysis, smell, and vision, which cannot be explained by the laws of classical physics, can be addressed by quantum physics, specifically biological physics, and thus be transferred to phenomena described in the health sciences. This will undoubtedly revolutionize the understanding of human life. For example, within the framework of quantum biology, consciousness and the soul are believed to be contained in microtubules, structures within brain cells. The understanding and subsequent prediction of chemical reactions responsible for the signs and symptoms of disease, and for health (homeostasis), are addressed by quantum science, which allows us to redescribe the properties of DNA and proteins. This essay presents reflections on the fundamental processes that occur in humans from a quantum perspective, a possible dialogue despite the limited number of quantum theories and the pretension of considering the complex phenomena that characterize the health sciences as classical and reductionist.
In this work, we introduce a quantum-inspired epidemic model to study the dynamics of an infectious disease in a population divided into compartments. By treating the healthy population as a large reservoir, we construct a framework based on open quantum systems and a Hilbert space formalism to model the spread of the infection. This approach allows for a mathematical framework that captures both Markovian and semi-Markovian dynamics in the evolution equations. Through numerical experiments, we examine the effect of varying memory parameters on the epidemic evolution, focusing in particular on the conditions under which the model remains physically admissible.This article is part of the theme issue 'Quantum theory and topology in models of decision making (Part 1)'.
The leading cause and foremost reason for mortality and morbidity in the world is a group known as Noncommunicable Diseases. The best approach to treat them is to evaluate and control the risk factors. There are shared by all these diseases leading to the existence of some meeting points behind all of them. There should be some key to acquire conditions that modify the cells homeostasis and impaired the cell physiology developing different diseases. Physics try to explain the nature of the phenomena that surround us, at first, at the level of our macroscopic perception. Quantum physics studied the atomic and subatomic particles and revolutionized the reality perception with paradoxical and weird concepts. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle established that it is not possible to determine the two characteristic properties of particles with accuracy; measurement affects the system and change it. Subatomic particles have a wave-particle duality that could be in a coherence statement, also can pass through high-energy barriers. Two subatomic particles are entangled, something happening over here can have an instantaneous effect over there, no matter how far away there are. All these concepts have tried to apply to biology and life sciences, especially when classical physics fails to give an accurate description. Quantum biology is behind photosynthesis, mitochondrial respiration, enzyme activity, the sense of smell, animal migration, heredity's fidelity, and consciousness. We can apply all these concepts to diseases pathogeny. So, we describe quantum phenomena in oxidative stress, calcification, signal transduction, vitamin D production, cancer mutations, and microbiome induced pathology. I want to propose that medicine also can be explained by applying quantum physics concepts. It is a new, hard to believe, and an incredible path to be built, but we need to open the treatment options to our patients with new perspectives.