The project will analyze immune cells from blood samples to help researchers understand how differences in the immune system influence disease risk, progression, and treatment response.
Ultima Genomics announced that its UG200 Sequencing Platform has been selected to power a new large-scale immune profiling study in collaboration with IMU Biosciences and UK Biobank. The project aims to generate a single-cell immune profiling artificial intelligence foundational dataset from an initial cohort of 80,000 blood samples collected from UK Biobank participants, with the ambition to expand across the full cohort of 500,000 participants.
The resulting dataset will add a high-resolution immune data layer to UK Biobank, providing researchers with deeper biological context across population-scale cohorts.
Integrating Multiomics and Sequencing Platforms
The study combines IMU’s High Definition Immunology platform with the BD FACSDiscover Cell Analyzer platform and the BD Rhapsody single-cell multiomics platform from Waters Corporation, alongside Ultima’s sequencing instrumentation.
Scheduled to begin in 2026, the initiative will integrate the new immune profiling layer with UK Biobank’s existing de-identified genomic, imaging, clinical, and lifestyle data. Over time, the data will be returned to UK Biobank and made available to approved researchers investigating how immune system variation influences disease risk, disease progression, treatment response, and long-term health outcomes.
Scaling Single-Cell Multiomics for Biobanks
As part of the evaluation process, the UG200 Sequencing Platform was validated to demonstrate performance with the BD Rhapsody platform while offering the throughput and low cost necessary to execute large-scale studies. The UG200 platform originally launched to early access customer sites in February 2026 and is now shipping broadly. Paired with single-cell multiomics workflows, the system is designed to make sequencing-intensive applications economically feasible at population scale.
The initiative expands on Ultima’s prior selection as the sequencing provider for the 600,000-sample UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project.
“Understanding the immune system at population scale demands sequencing that is high-throughput, high-quality, and at extremely low cost to make a study of this ambition viable,” says Gilad Almogy, CEO of Ultima Genomics, in a release. “Our platform was designed to unlock biology at a scale previously thought impossible, and we are proud to be selected alongside the BD FACSDiscover Cell Analyzer platform and BD Rhapsody single-cell multiomics platform from Waters to power foundational dataset generation and enable a new layer of single-cell immune-profiling data for IMU Biosciences and UK Biobank. Building on our ongoing work with the 600,000-sample UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project, this demonstrates the platform’s suitability for large-scale omics data generation from large, deeply characterized biobank cohorts.”
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