NEW YORK – Illumina and Broad Clinical Labs (BCL) said Friday that they will collaborate to develop a 5 billion-cell atlas within three years using Illumina single-cell sequencing technologies.
Under the terms of the deal, BCL will use a combination of Illumina's Single Cell Prep, NovaSeq X Plus instrument, 25B flow cell, and Dragen analysis software for Perturb-seq, CRISPR screens, and other applications in disease modeling and drug development.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"By expanding our partnership to single-cell solutions, we're making significant strides to understand the roots of disease and close the gap between new biological insights and impact for patients," said Aziz Al'Khafaji, director of molecular R&D at BCL. "The capabilities we're building, like combining Perturb-seq with Illumina Single Cell 3' RNA Prep, will support rapid and consistent data generation like we've demonstrated in the whole-genome space, giving the research community the ability to create billion-cell atlas studies to make the next discoveries."
Formerly the Broad Clinical Research Sequencing Platform, BCL is a CLIA-licensed, CAP-accredited, wholly owned subsidiary of the Broad Institute handling external research services, including sequencing, single-cell analysis, and multiomics.
The collaboration builds on an existing partnership between BCL and Illumina. The lab operates a large fleet of Illumina's highest-throughput sequencers, and earlier this week the partners announced that BCL would handle sequencing for a collaboration with the Broad Institute to advance a new spatial transcriptomics method revealed by Illumina.