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Illumina Launches Pilot Proteomics Study With UK Biobank, Inks Partnership With Nvidia

NEW YORK – Illumina said Monday that it has launched a pilot proteomics program to analyze 50,000 UK Biobank samples in collaboration with DeCode Genetics, Standard BioTools, Tecan, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, and Novartis.

Separately, the company announced a collaboration with Nvidia to advance multiomics data analysis and interpretation capabilities for clinical research, genomics artificial intelligence development, and drug discovery.

For the proteomics pilot study, Illumina and collaborators will deploy the upcoming Illumina Protein Prep assay, which was developed in partnership with Standard BioTools, powered by its Slow Off-Rate Modified Aptamer (SOMAmer) technology, originally developed by SomaLogic.

As part of the study, the UK Biobank will provide 50,000 samples, which will overlap with the study cohort included in the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project (UKB-PPP), a separate research collaboration between the UK Biobank and 14 biopharmaceutical companies, which also include GSK, Johnson & Johnson, and Novartis.

Last week, the UK Biobank and the UKB-PPP kicked off a new study to profile the plasma proteome in all of its participants using the Olink Explore HT affinity proteomics assay from Thermo Fisher Scientific and the UG 100 sequencing platform from Ultima Genomics.

"This project complements the work of the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project by providing additional proteomic assay data for 50,000 of the UK Biobank volunteers' blood samples," UK Biobank Principal Investigator and Chief Executive Rory Collins said in a statement. "This addition of increasingly rich proteomics data will help researchers paint an even more dynamic picture of how an individual's genetics, environment, and lifestyle come together to impact the development of different diseases."

For Illumina's pilot, DeCode Genetics will process the samples using the Illumina Protein Prep and the NovaSeq X Plus platform. The analysis will be done using the DRAGEN Protein Quantification pipeline.

Of the 50,000 samples, the first 30,000 are funded through a co-investment from Illumina, DeCode Genetics, and Standard BioTools, with automation partner support from Tecan.

According to Illumina, the data generated from these first 30,000 samples will be made available by UK Biobank immediately to researchers after the resulting data has undergone quality control, which is expected to be in the second half of 2025.

For the data generated from an additional 20,000 samples, the industry partners, including DeCode Genetics, GSK, Johnson & Johnson, and Novartis, will have a period of exclusive access. Following that period, the data will be made available by UK Biobank to the wider scientific research community.

Illumina said it anticipates additional companies to join the consortium.

For the first phase of its collaboration with Nvidia, Illumina said it will work with the company to enable its DRAGEN algorithms on Nvidia GPUs in order to expand the accessibility of Illumina multiomics analysis.

The two companies will also work to incorporate Nvidia's image processing and single-cell tertiary analysis tools into the Illumina Connected Software multiomics module.

More specifically, Illumina said it will work to include the Nvidia Rapids accelerated data science software; the Nvidia BioNeMo platform, which develops generative AI models and fine-tune capabilities for proprietary datasets; and MONAI, which is for spatial cell imaging workflows, in the Illumina Connected Analytics platform.

With these tools, Illumina said its customers will be able to leverage these models with their own proprietary datasets to improve the performance for biologically relevant tasks of interest, such as cell state or gene transcription prediction.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.