FOSTER CITY, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 11: A sign for the biotechnology company Illumina is seen outside their offices on March 11, 2025 in Foster City, California. China’s Ministry of Commerce said it will ban Illumina, a San Diego-based biotechnology company, from importing its gene-sequencing products in China as the country battles U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

In a move away from its core focus on DNA sequencing technology, San Diego-based biotech Illumina has debuted a genetic dataset designed to help expedite the drug discovery process. The company announced the news on 13 January during the ongoing 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference held in San Francisco.

According to Illumina, the genome-wide genetic perturbation dataset, which the company has coined the Illumina Billion Cell Atlas – or The Atlas – is the “most comprehensive map of human disease biology to date”.

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The Atlas, which is powered by CRISPR and 200 disease-relevant cell lines across immunology, oncology, neurological, cardiometabolic and rare genetic indications, aims to capture how individual cells may respond to 20,000 genes being switched on or off. This means that drug developers can map and characterise the traits and disease mechanisms of historically hard-to-treat diseases – potentially improving the drug target validation process.

The dataset was created in collaboration with pharma giants AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly and MSD (Merck & Co). The latter plans to use The Atlas as a source to train its drug discovery artificial intelligence (AI) models, which is one of The Atlas’ most promising qualities, according to Illumina’s CEO, Jacob Thaysen.

This is because The Atlas is equipped to help “map the biologics pathways” behind burdensome and hard-to-treat diseases, allowing researchers to optimise their drug discovery workflow by identifying promising targets.

The Atlas is also designed to generate 20 petabytes of single-cell transcriptomic data within a year through the company’s Single Cell 3’ RNA prep platform – allowing information from millions of individual cells to be captured during a singular experiment.

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The Billion Cell Atlas is the first data product to make its market debut after Illumina launched its new BioInsight business division back in October 2025.

In a presentation on the second day of JPM26, Thaysen noted that the company’s long-term growth will stem from its product offerings in the multiomics segment, as well as in the sales of proprietary datasets and software like The Atlas.