Sovereign AI, a UK-backed program, has awarded IMU Biosciences £1.57 million to profile 80,000 UK Biobank blood samples, adding immune data that approved researchers could use to study disease.
The award comes through Sovereign AI’s Strategic Assets Programme, which supports shared datasets and infrastructure. The program said resources that individual companies may struggle to build alone could serve researchers and businesses working on drug discovery and AI-enabled health care.
The study will use IMU’s High Definition Immunology platform to examine the samples. Waters Corporation will provide its BD Rhapsody single-cell multiomics platform and BD FACSDiscover Cell Analyzer platform, while Ultima Genomics’ UG200 platform will produce sequencing data.
IMU estimates that each sample will yield more than 100 million immune measurements. The results would give researchers another form of data to examine alongside the genomic, clinical, imaging and lifestyle information already held by UK Biobank.
UK Biobank Chief Scientist Professor Naomi Allen said the data could help researchers investigate future disease risk and support earlier detection and more accurate diagnosis. Those are potential uses of the planned dataset, rather than findings from the study.
Waters and IMU announced their technology partnership on June 24. Waters says the products involved are for research use only.
UK Biobank has a separate project analyzing proteins in 600,000 samples, covering all 500,000 of its baseline participants plus repeat samples from some participants. Its 2025 annual report says that project uses Ultima’s earlier UG100 platform and that its data are scheduled to become available to approved researchers in 2027.
Ultima has raised the possibility of extending immune profiling to UK Biobank’s full 500,000-participant cohort. The announced initial study covers 80,000 blood samples; the partners have not said how many distinct participants those samples represent.
Ultima said the immune study is planned to begin in 2026. Its results are to be returned to UK Biobank over time for access by approved researchers.
