Illumina Launches Billion Cell Atlas to Accelerate AI-Driven Drug Discovery
核心洞察
Illumina introduced the world's largest genome-wide genetic perturbation dataset, the Billion Cell Atlas, designed to accelerate drug discovery through AI across the pharmaceutical ecosystem.
The Atlas captures how 1 billion individual cells respond to genetic changes via CRISPR across more than 200 disease-relevant cell lines, including immune disorders, cancer, cardiometabolic, neurological, and rare genetic diseases.
Major pharmaceutical companies including AstraZeneca, Merck (搜索), and Eli Lilly are founding participants in the alliance framework, leveraging the data to train AI models and validate drug targets.
Illumina has unveiled the world's largest genome-wide genetic perturbation dataset, the Billion Cell Atlas, marking a significant milestone in the convergence of genomics and artificial intelligence for drug discovery. The San Diego-based genomics leader announced the initiative as part of an alliance framework with AstraZeneca, Merck (搜索), and Eli Lilly and Company as founding participants.
The Atlas represents the first phase of Illumina's ambitious three-year program to construct a 5 billion cell atlas, positioning itself as the most comprehensive map of human disease biology to date. The dataset captures how 1 billion individual cells respond to genetic changes via CRISPR technology across more than 200 disease-relevant cell lines.
Targeting Complex Disease Mechanisms
The selected cell lines span diseases that have historically been difficult to decode, including immune disorders, cancer, cardiometabolic conditions, neurological diseases, and rare genetic disorders. Using CRISPR technology, researchers can rapidly study the effects of switching on and off all 20,000 genes in key cell types throughout the body.
"We believe the cell atlas is a key development that will enable us to significantly scale AI for drug discovery," said Jacob Thaysen, chief executive officer of Illumina. "We are building an unparalleled resource for training the next generation of AI models for precision medicine and drug target identification, ultimately helping map the biological pathways behind some of the world's most devastating diseases."
Pharmaceutical Industry Applications
The Atlas enables users to characterize drug and disease mechanisms of action, explore potential new indications, and validate candidate targets from human genetics. Merck (搜索) plans to leverage the Atlas to accelerate precision medicine approaches across their drug discovery pipelines, using the data to train proprietary AI/ML foundation models and build virtual cell models.
"By harnessing advanced genomic patient datasets, Merck (搜索) scientists are building and leveraging AI models grounded in real biological variation—not just literature text—and translating those insights into novel targets and precision biomarkers that matter for patients," said Iya Khalil, vice president and head of Data, A.I. & Genome Sciences at Merck.
AstraZeneca views the Atlas as addressing a core challenge in R&D. "Translating genetic information into a clear understanding of disease mechanisms—and then ultimately into medicines—remains a core challenge in R&D," said Slavé Petrovski, vice president, Centre for Genomics Research at AstraZeneca. "By showing how specific genetic perturbations play out inside human cells, we can help turn genetic signals into mechanistic biology we can directly study, bringing greater clarity to drug development decisions."
Technical Infrastructure and Scale
The Atlas generates data at an unprecedented rate of 20 petabytes of single-cell transcriptomic data within a year. This scale is made possible by Illumina's Single Cell 3' RNA prep platform, which enables millions of individual cells to be captured in a single experiment. The massive datasets are processed using Illumina's DRAGEN pipeline with hardware acceleration and hosted on the Illumina Connected Analytics cloud platform for scalable analysis.
Ruth Gimeno, group vice president of Cardiometabolic Research at Eli Lilly and Company, emphasized the foundational importance of such comprehensive datasets: "The next generation of AI-driven drug discovery will depend on biological data at a scale never before achieved. Comprehensive datasets spanning diverse cell types offer the critical foundation needed to generate meaningful insights into human disease."
BioInsight Business Launch
The Atlas marks the first data product from Illumina's newly created BioInsight business, designed to provide foundational technologies and datasets to power next-generation drug discovery and AI in pharma. The company has already generated data from approximately 150 million cells and expects to reach the billion-cell milestone by the end of the year.
Illumina is actively expanding multi-billion cell atlases over time with its partners, building on the company's initiative announced in February to ultimately create a 5 billion single-cell resource. The initiative represents a strategic shift for Illumina from primarily providing sequencing instruments to offering comprehensive data products and analytical capabilities for pharmaceutical applications.