IMU Biosciences has entered into a landmark strategic collaboration with UK Biobank, Waters Corporation, and Ultima Genomics to generate the world’s most detailed, large-scale multi-omic immune profiling dataset. Supported by a £1.57 million Sovereign AI grant from the UK government, the ambitious initiative will initially leverage IMU’s High Definition Immunology™ platform, alongside advanced flow cytometry, single-cell multi-omics, and high-throughput sequencing technologies, to analyze blood samples from an initial cohort of 80,000 UK Biobank participants, with plans to expand across the full cohort of 500,000 individuals. By generating over 100 million immune data points per sample, the initiative integrates high-dimensional immune-cell profiling, transcriptomic analysis, and AI computational models to establish a foundational reference map linking immune variation to disease risk, progression, treatment response, and long-term health outcomes. Emphasizing the clinical significance, Dr. Adam Laing PhD, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of IMU Biosciences, noted, “IMU and UK Biobank’s collaboration represents an important opportunity to add a new immune dimension to one of the world’s most important and comprehensive biomedical research resources. UK Biobank has transformed how researchers study the genetic, molecular and lifestyle factors that contribute to health and disease and this study will help generate an unrivalled resource that we believe will bring huge value across biomedical research and, ultimately, patients. By adding a high-resolution immune profiling layer to the UK Biobank’s existing data researchers studying immune variation across a number of disease areas will be able to identify how immune profiles relate to disease risk, progression, treatment response and long-term health outcomes.” Reinforcing the transformative potential for global medicine, Professor Naomi Allen, Chief Scientist at UK Biobank, stated, “This new dataset will provide our global research community with a valuable insight into how the immune system changes with ageing. Scientists will be able to study which specific immune cell changes contribute to the future risk of conditions like cancer, diabetes and dementia, paving the way for earlier disease detection and more accurate diagnosis. Blood samples from UK Biobank’s generous participants have already been turned into genetic, proteomic and metabolomic data. When complete, this detailed map of the immune system will in turn fuel the detection of new drug targets and help clinicians to understand who might respond best to a particular treatment.”
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Highlighting the infrastructure’s technical alignment, Gilad Almogy, Chief Executive Officer of Ultima Genomics, added, “IMU’s work with UK Biobank represents exactly the type of large-scale, data-intensive program our recently launched UG200 Platform was designed to enable. Having also recently been selected for UK Biobank’s 600,000 sample Pharma Proteomics Project, Ultima is proud to continue enabling the addition of new omics data layers from one of the world’s most important biomedical research resources. Generating data at this scale requires a combination of throughput, quality, cost efficiency and operational execution. We are pleased to support IMU as it creates a high-resolution view of the human immune system across a population-scale cohort, generating data that can advance immune prediction, disease understanding, therapeutic research and AI-enabled biomedical discovery.” Concurrently, Steve Conly, Senior Vice President, Waters Biosciences at Waters Corporation, remarked, “This pioneering collaboration showcases how the convergence of advanced flow cytometry, single-cell multi-omics, sequencing, AI-driven analysis, and large-scale sample sets can unlock entirely new dimensions of immune insights. Together, our cutting-edge BD FACSDiscover™ Cell Analyzer platform, BD flow cytometry reagents, BD Rhapsody™ instruments, and BD OMICS-One™ WTA Next Assay and Protein Panels will support IMU and our shared vision of advancing immune profiling into a standardized, widely accessible tool that can help transform how diseases like cancer are understood, monitored and treated.” Over time, all derived data will be returned to the UK Biobank’s cloud platform to empower global scientific discovery, drug target identification, and precision patient stratification.
