Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ: ILMN) and Ovation.io, Inc. announced today a landmark collaboration to develop the world's largest commercially available clinical multiomic dataset from 25,000 patients treated with glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist therapies. This first-of-its-kind initiative aims to accelerate drug discovery and development in the rapidly expanding field of metabolic disease treatment.
The dataset will integrate phenotypic, genomic, and proteomic data from both therapy-responsive and nonresponsive populations, addressing a significant unmet need in the field. According to a 2024 Kaiser Family Foundation health tracking poll, one in eight adults in the United States have used a GLP-1 receptor agonist. However, a study published in Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome in 2024 revealed that approximately 40% of users with Type 2 diabetes do not respond effectively to these therapies.
"The power of whole-genome and multiomic insights to impact all diseases is coming into focus, and metabolic disease is a prime example," said Todd Christian, senior vice president of Services, Arrays, and Genomic Access at Illumina. "This collaboration and its novel clinical dataset will be crucial to advancing the next wave of these potential life-changing therapies, and ensuring more patients can benefit from them."
Comprehensive Multiomic Approach
The multiyear agreement between Illumina and Ovation will leverage end-to-end Illumina next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies to sequence 25,000 whole genomes. Additionally, the project will profile protein expression of 5,000 samples using the Illumina Protein Prep (IPP) assay, which detects 9,500 human proteins per sample. The initiative plans to include a longitudinal subset of proteomes from paired samples collected before and after patient exposure to GLP-1 therapy.
Marty Miller, chief revenue officer of Ovation, emphasized the significance of this collaboration: "We're proud to collaborate with Illumina to develop one of the world's largest WGS omics datasets, supporting the millions of patients with diabetes and obesity. Through this effort—and for the first time at scale with the inclusion of proteomics—we aim to equip the pharmaceutical industry with the insights needed to better understand the varying effectiveness and side effects of GLP-1 receptor agonists across individual patients."
Advancing Precision Medicine
The IPP enables the discovery of new protein quantitative trait loci (pQTL), which are emerging as a vital tool for drug discovery by linking genetic variation with protein expression data and disease phenotypes. The pQTL dataset will be processed using Illumina's DRAGEN secondary analysis and the newly released Illumina Connected Multiomics for tertiary analysis and visualizations, with data stored in Illumina Connected Analytics for future large-scale studies.
Ovation is providing samples from its extensive biobank of over 1.7 million de-identified, consented, and tokenized samples, linked to rich, longitudinal phenotypic data. This resource will be crucial for understanding the molecular pathways involved in GLP-1 response.
Expanding Research Applications
The collaboration aims to achieve three primary objectives:
- Accelerate GLP-1 therapy development for existing indications
- Support indication expansion research to identify new therapeutic applications
- Discover novel biomarkers and drug targets for nonresponsive populations
This initiative builds upon an original agreement between Illumina and Ovation announced in 2024, which focused on creating pilot datasets from patients with liver disease, chronic kidney disease, and patients treated with GLP-1 receptor agonists. The companies plan to explore opportunities to scale the GLP-1 dataset and generate additional datasets in the future.
Implications for Metabolic Disease Treatment
The GLP-1 receptor agonist market has seen explosive growth in recent years, with these therapies initially approved for Type 2 diabetes and subsequently for obesity. The pharmaceutical industry is actively investigating additional indications, including cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and neurodegenerative disorders.
By providing unprecedented insights into the molecular mechanisms of GLP-1 response and resistance, this dataset could potentially transform treatment approaches for metabolic diseases and expand therapeutic applications to new patient populations. The integration of genomic and proteomic data may reveal previously unknown biological pathways and therapeutic targets, particularly for the significant percentage of patients who currently do not benefit from these treatments.
As the dataset becomes available to the pharmaceutical community, it is expected to catalyze innovation in drug discovery and development, potentially leading to more personalized treatment approaches for patients with metabolic disorders.
