QCNEWS
Genetically encodable fluorescent proteins, engineered to hold a quantum state and roughly ten times smaller than today's diamond sensors, will be tested as in cell measurement tools in a five year Phase 2 program.
The University of Chicago's QuBBE institute will spend the next five years trying to move quantum sensing out of the lab dish and into living cells, under a $37.5 million renewal from the National Science Foundation.
The award is one piece of a wider $290 million package NSF announced across eight Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes (QLCIs), a federal program created under the National Quantum Initiative Act to seed multi-institution research hubs. The eight-institute round covers 36 universities and research institutions in 19 states; three centers are new, and five, including QuBBE, were renewed for a second five-year phase. NSF launched the QLCI program in 2020 with an original cohort that included the Hybrid Quantum Architectures and Networks (HQAN) institute led by Illinois IQUIST, alongside the Center for Quantum Coherence (CIQC) at UC Berkeley and Q-Sense at CU Boulder/JILA. The 2026 round is the program's first major cohort renewal.
QuBBE, the Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Sensing for Biophysics and Bioengineering, is built around a specific bet: that fluorescent proteins can be engineered to hold and read out a quantum state, the way the spin of an electron does in a more conventional qubit. In Phase 1, UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) researchers Peter Maurer and David Awschalom showed that fluorescent proteins can function as spin qubits: quantum states read at single-particle resolution, here encoded in a glowing protein rather than in a superconducting circuit or a trapped ion. Phase 2 turns that lab result into a research tool by targeting the proteins into living cells, where they could in principle sense temperature, pH, or magnetic fields at scales today's hardware cannot reach.
The mechanism is what separates this from the diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) sensors that dominate quantum-sensing demos today. NV centers are atom-scale flaws in diamond that can be read with a laser and used as tiny magnetometers, but they are physically large, and the diamond particles have to be delivered into a sample from outside. Protein qubits, by contrast, are genetically encodable: a cell can be programmed to make the sensor itself, which is roughly ten times smaller than a nanodiamond NV-center sensor and can be expressed in whatever subcellular location a researcher wants to study. That size and addressability is the load-bearing difference between a benchtop demonstration and an in vivo measurement.
Phase 2 organizes that work into four named thrusts: novel biological nanoprobes; entanglement and squeezed-light sensing; in vivo cellular measurement; and broad clinical and biological technology adoption. The last item is the broadest: it covers the long-tail work of making any of these tools usable outside the original lab, including integration with UChicago's new Berggren Center for Quantum Biology and Medicine.
QuBBE is also routing the renewal through Chicago's regional quantum-training pipeline. Chicago State University runs a Quantum Institute and a Q-Cert program, hosts a master's track in quantum science, and is partnered with UIC's Quantum Academy, which feeds K-12 students into the same network. NSF's framing for the wider QLCI cohort is the same: quantum is no longer a single-instrument field, and the federal push is paying for the people and the pipeline as much as for the instruments.
The honest framing: this is in vivo research tooling, not approved diagnostics or near-term patient care. The Phase 2 deliverables are sensors that work inside a cell, plus the calibration and reproducibility work that turns a publication into a tool. The falsifier is concrete too: if protein qubits cannot hold coherence long enough, or cannot deliver enough signal in a living cell to beat the noise floor, the in vivo thrust narrows back to a niche instrument and the broader biomedical framing is the part that has to give. NSF is betting $37.5 million that the protein-qubit approach can clear that bar before the renewal runs out in 2030.