Overview
- A joint announcement on Monday, October 19, 2026 between IMU Biosciences, UK Biobank, Waters Corporation, and Ultima Genomics unveiled a plan to profile an initial 80,000 UK Biobank blood samples with the aim of scaling to the full 500,000 participant cohort.
- The project will pair IMU’s HD Immunology platform with Waters’ BD FACSDiscover cell analyzer and BD Rhapsody single‑cell multiomics workflow while using Ultima’s UG200 sequencer as the validated readout engine.
- A £1.57 million U.K. Sovereign AI grant will fund profiling of the first roughly 10,000 samples and reduce early financial risk for the initial phase of the program.
- Resulting de‑identified, AI‑ready single‑cell immune data will be returned to UK Biobank’s cloud resources for controlled access by approved researchers to link cell‑level immune variation with existing genomic, imaging, clinical, and lifestyle records.
- Ultima’s low‑cost UG200 and the validated integration with Waters/BD equipment are intended to make population‑scale single‑cell multiomics feasible, which could speed drug‑target discovery, immune‑prediction models, and studies of aging and disease.