Illumina and new generation sequencing (NGS) are synonymous. But for anyone who pays attention to it, the emphasis put by the company on the multiomic was difficult to miss. Indeed, the company has launched both proteomic and unique cell applications in recent months. Despite this, an “Ome has visibly missed in their portfolio: spatial transcriptomic.
But now Illumina has closed this loop. A few days before the largest genomic conference of the year, the progress of biology and genome technology (AGBT), Illumina announced a new space technology program.
Why now? “There have been great progress in the space,” noted Joel Fellis, PHD, vice-president, management of sequencing platforms at Illumina, “but we have put a lot of investment in R&D and we think that We can speed up what is possible. ”
The company is working on space technology and has explored the options for several years, said Darren Segale, PHD, principal director of scientific research in Illumina, said Gen. “We have experienced and evaluated the market. But in the past year, or half and a half, we accelerated it. »»
The product will be a kit, which will be distributed with substrates (slides), reagents and consumable support. Users will go through a chemistry workflow to permeate, hybridize and create an DNC library which will be entirely compatible with the illumina sequencers – both Novaseq and NextSeq. Users can also imagine H&E slides and integrate this into the test, that some researchers consider valuable information for good segmentation of cells.
The company is launching two different flavors of the kit which vary in the size of the capture area: offering high at high flow options, depending on the amount of fabric placed on the slide and the type of fabric. The number of readings per sample will depend on the number of samples loaded on the substrate: one user could load two, three or four samples per substrate, or sequence a single sample deeper. Segale estimates that, generally, they see 30,000 unique genes per sample. But they have reached up to 40,000. For resolution, the characteristics are roughly a micron.
Early feedback
It is very early for the space technology of Illumina, with a lot of unknowns. But first two users have given Generation An overview of data quality. None of the researchers managed the kit internally: they sent slides to Illumina for processing and received data from the company.
From the point of view of the data, “we were able to capture transcriptions that had referred us to other tests,” commented Jasmine Plummer, PHD, director of the Center for Space Omics at the Children’s Research Hospital St. Jude. “Since our data set, there is a high sensitivity and a very large number of features captured for a difficult type of fabric,” she added.
Another early user, Nick Banovich, PHD, professor and aggregate director, division and director of bioinnovation and Genome Sciences, Center for Spatial Multi-IOICs (Cosmo) in Tgen in Phoenix, described two exceptional features at Generation: A large capture zone, which allows users to profile many more fabrics in an experience and a high sensitivity. For example, he noted: “If we are talking about a cell, there are a lot of genes where there is a good dynamic beach.” Banovich sent two slides and received data from one million cells.
SEGALE attributes the high sensitivity to two qualities: the capture of polya which can capture many transcriptions and advanced surface technologies.
But the space has existed for years, with established space tests based on NGS such as Stomics Stereo-Seq and 10x Genomics Visium. Why is Illumina enter the field only now? “The space is interesting,” noted Felli, “and has existed for some time but is not as mature as a single cell. There is still a lot of evaluation in progress and customers often have to make painful compromises Between the resolution or the magnitude of the coverage.
Illumina thinks that his combination of coverage and high resolution extent is unique and will lead to a large adoption. The start of access begins later this year with a full commercial launch scheduled for 2026.
A stranger is the cost of the kit. Felis said there will probably be a 2–4x reduction in the price of the unit zone (it refers to spatial preparation only: this does not include the cost of sequencing based on experience).
In coordination with Illumina’s announcement of space technology, it also associates it with a new software platform, Illumina Connected Multiomics (ICM). The ICM is a multimodal-based multimodal analysis platform which allows researchers to explore and analyze multicular data sets, such as genomics, proteomics, spatial, epigenetics, unique, etc.
Why has Illumina announced its space technology before the genomic community descends to Marco Island for AGBT next week? They wanted to lead to excitement before people were on the ground in Florida, said Fellis. In an appropriate way, Samantha Beal, Associate Director of Illumina, public relations, added: “We wanted to give his own moment to the sun.”