Before revision:  In this article, we present a numerical study of the (stoquastic) adiabatic quantum algorithm applied to protein lattice folding. Using exact numerical modelling of small systems, we find that the time-to-solution metric scales exponentially with peptide length, even for small peptides. However, comparison with classical heuristics for optimisation indicates a potential limited quantum speedup .
After revision:  In this article, we present a numerical study of quantum annealing applied to a large number of small peptide folding problems, aiming to infer useful insights for near-term applications. We present two conclusions: that even naive quantum annealing, when applied to protein lattice folding, has the potential to outperform classical approaches, and that careful engineering of the Hamiltonians and schedules involved can deliver notable relative improvements for this problem .