Illumina’s New Spatial Products
By Bio-IT World Staff
February 19, 2025 | Today, Illumina announced a new spatial technology program of Illumina sequencers and a multimodal analysis platform. The company also announced a collaboration with the Broad Institute on spatial transcriptomics. Illumina's spatial technology delivers unbiased whole-transcriptome profiling with cellular resolution and high sensitivity. The products and some early access projects will be presented at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) General Meeting in Florida.
“Spatial transcriptomics opens entirely new pathways to gain crucial insight into the cellular function of organisms,” said Steve Barnard, PhD, chief technology officer of Illumina in the announcement. “Illumina spatial technology will deliver another complete workflow on our leading sequencing platforms. With this innovation, we are setting a new bar that will drive the next wave of scientific discoveries and unlock a deeper understanding of biology—from the impact of cell interactions on disease to the mechanisms needed to solve them.”
Spatial transcriptomics allows researchers to explore biological interactions at the cellular level. For instance, through “cell atlasing,” which maps the detailed arrangement of cells, researchers can gain novel insights into complex tissue structures that affect disease. This enables discovery in areas ranging from tumor microenvironments to disease pathways, neurobiology, immuno-oncology, and more.
Planned for commercial release in 2026, Illumina spatial technology will allow researchers to examine the spatial proximity of millions of cells per experiment, enabled by a capture area nine times larger than existing technologies, and with four times greater resolution. By allowing researchers to analyze more cells in a single spatial experiment, the technology provides the ability to identify rare cell populations and improves statistical power for greater confidence in findings. As a complete end-to-end solution, it will also deliver the highest value for single-cell and spatial researchers at a more affordable price point. The spatial solution surpasses industry standards for scale and accuracy, and is compatible with Illumina NextSeq and NovaSeq sequencers.
New Software
The spatial technology will be paired with a new software platform, Illumina Connected Multiomics (ICM). ICM is a multimodal analysis platform that makes it easy for researchers to visualize the results of spatial experiments. ICM helps them navigate, explore, and analyze multiomic data sets, ultimately driving deeper insights from biological data. Its intuitive design and seamless integration with the sequencing workflow will allow any scientist to generate powerful statistical insights and interactive visualizations to decode multiple complex modalities, such as genomic, proteomic, spatial transcriptomic, epigenetic, and single-cell data, all in the same platform.
"Illumina Connected Multiomics will unlock a seamless workflow, from sample to analysis, providing the powerful visual and statistical analysis tools needed to accelerate the next wave of life sciences breakthroughs," said Rami Mehio, head of global software and informatics at Illumina.
Spatial Flagship Project
In conjunction with the product announcement, Illumina also announced a collaboration with the Broad Institute on a Spatial Flagship Project, leveraging Illumina's new spatial technology. The project will be conducted at the Broad Institute's Spatial Technology Platform (STP), with sequencing performed at Broad Clinical Labs.
Leveraging Illumina's advanced spatial technology, which provides an expansive 50 mm by 15 mm imaging area for enhanced flexibility, sensitivity, resolution, and unbiased whole-transcriptome discovery, the Spatial Flagship Project seeks to demonstrate the transformative potential of large-scale spatial datasets. This collaboration will generate large-scale, coordinated data from hundreds of samples provided by Broad Institute principal investigators, with the goal of advancing discovery in the spatial technology market. Additionally, the project will offer early access to Illumina's spatial technology to external research groups through the Broad Institute's STP pipeline, fostering broader engagement and accelerating innovation.