London-based IMU Biosciences, together with the UK Biobank, has announced a collaboration to generate the world’s most detailed, large-scale picture of the human immune system. By integrating high-dimensional immune-cell profiling, transcriptomic analysis, and AI-based computational methods, the study aims to reveal the human immune system in unprecedented detail and scale.
The project will add a high-resolution immune data layer and a foundational dataset to UK Biobank by generating more than 100 million immune data points from each of tens of thousands of samples to create the largest, most detailed immune dataset assembled to date. In order to do so, the project has selected the technology of both Waters and Ultima Genomics.
The project will use IMU’s HD Immunology platform in conjunction with Waters Corporation’s flow cytometry and multiomic instrumentation (BD FACSDiscover Cell Analyzer platform and BD Rhapsody single-cell multiomics platform) as part of their strategic partnership announced in June. Ultima’s recently launched UG200 Sequencing Platform will produce the project’s readouts and support large scale data generation. Taken together, the project will profile blood samples from an initial cohort of 80,000 blood samples from UK Biobank participants with the hope to expand across the full UK Biobank cohort of 500,000 participants.
“We are proud to be selected alongside the BD platforms from Waters to power foundational dataset generation and enable a new layer of single-cell immune-profiling data,” said Gilad Almogy, PhD, CEO of Ultima Genomics. “Building on our ongoing work with the 600,000-sample UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project, this demonstrates the platform’s suitability for large-scale omics data generation from large, deeply characterized biobank cohorts.”
The project will begin this year and will add a new immune profiling data layer on top of UK Biobank’s existing de-identified genomic, imaging, clinical and lifestyle data. Over time, the resulting data will be returned to UK Biobank and made available to approved researchers studying how immune variation relates to disease risk, progression, treatment response, and long-term health outcomes.
As part of the selection process, Ultima’s UG200 Sequencing Platform was validated on its performance with the BD Rhapsody platform and to work together to enable the large-scale project. The UG200 Sequencing Platform was launched in February 2026 and is now shipping.
Uniting UK Biobank’s population-scale samples with single-cell immune profiling, the collaboration is designed to generate immune data at the scale, reproducibility, and resolution needed for both broad biomedical research and future immune-prediction studies.
“This new dataset,” notes Naomi Allen, DPhil, chief scientist at UK Biobank, “will provide our global research community with a valuable insight into how the immune system changes with aging. 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,” Allen continues, “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.”