Illumina unveils new innovation hothouse – BioInsight

BioInsight will be led by Rami Mehio as senior vice president and general manager. Mehio has led Illumina's Global Software & Informatics team for four years and now joins the company's executive leadership team.

"Working together with our customers, we are going beyond sequencing and breaking the barrier between omics data generation and transformative insights," said Jacob Thaysen, CEO of Illumina.

"BioInsight, under Rami's guidance, will strengthen Illumina's leadership at the intersection of sequencing, software, and AI, with a focus on supporting pharma in drug target discovery and development."

BioInsight key focus areas are:-
• Working with large national initiatives and industry partners to enable large-scale genetic and biological data generation projects.
• Developing software solutions to analyse multimodal data at population scale.
• Providing platforms to enable private and secure data access for research and pharmaceutical partners.
• Developing AI tools through strategic partnerships to build an ecosystem for large-scale multimodal data analysis.

"We are at a pivotal moment in science and technology," Mehio said. "The dramatic reduction in sequencing costs has unlocked the ability to generate multiomic data at an unprecedented scale. At the same time, we are witnessing an extraordinary rise in AI capabilities.

"The confluence of these two forces is transforming how we derive biological insights, and Illumina is committed to partnering with our customers and collaborators to develop the largest, highest-quality datasets and the AI-driven tools that turn this data into meaningful discoveries."

Progress in the life sciences is accelerating as researchers gain the ability to collect and interpret vast amounts of multiomic data. Today, the field is generating more data than ever before, and advanced AI and software are vital to deriving actionable insights from complex multimodal datasets.

Ultimately, these insights hold the power to accelerate drug target discovery, disease diagnosis, and therapeutic development. Illumina is organising its new business to support essential functions that make this possible.

BioInsight will support data generation in three main ways: enabling large national research initiatives, working with corporate partners to develop valuable data assets, and facilitating large-scale federated data networks. This includes expanding beyond traditional genomics to include multiomic and advanced biological data types, such as perturb-seq.

AI and tool development - BioInsight is designed to harness all available multimodal data, creating the tools and resources needed to help customers and partners achieve meaningful results faster. With these tools, scientists can more quickly identify patterns, discover new drug targets, and improve disease diagnosis and treatment. In addition to developing its own tools and models, Illumina looks to partner with industry leaders to enable a broad ecosystem of tools to be developed leveraging its data assets.

With intent focus on the growth of scalable data and AI solutions, BioInsight and Illumina will drive customer access to rich omics data insights, faster and more efficiently, to accelerate transformative research and discovery.