Illumina is raising the curtain on its upcoming entry into spatial transcriptomics, with tech designed to help researchers explore cellular behavior mapped across complex tissues.
The announcement comes days before the annual Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting, being held in Florida—where the DNA sequencing giant is set to unveil more details and demonstrations—and follows up on Illumina’s recent expansions into proteomics and single-cell analysis.
The company said its spatial technology will run on its current NextSeq and NovaSeq hardware through a new multimodal software platform, with a full commercial release scheduled for 2026.
It is slated to provide analyses of millions of cells per experiment, within a 50 mm by 15 mm imaging area, and chart out their proximity and interactions with each other.
Illumina said this could enable hypothesis-free discovery efforts, with the goal of uncovering new cell types and potential drivers of disease—for example, hidden actors in tumor microenvironments, or other applications in neurology, immuno-oncology and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the new software, dubbed Illumina Connected Multiomics, will link up genomic, proteomic, spatial transcriptomic, epigenetic and single-cell analyses within the same platform.
At AGBT, the company plans to spotlight findings from early users of the approach.
That includes research into pulmonary fibrosis at the Translational Genomics Research Institute. “Our early analyses with this technology identified and localized molecular dysregulation associated with active epithelial cell remodeling in pulmonary fibrosis,” said Nicholas Banovich, associate director of TGen’s Center for Spatial Multi-Omics. “We believe this will aid in identifying therapeutic targets which can be used to stop or slow the progression of disease.”
In addition, a team at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard found they were able to perform 10 experiments on a single tissue slide, to help build 3D reconstructions of mouse brains.
“Large-scale and unbiased whole-transcriptome capture are the ideal components of a discovery platform capable of finding novel marker genes and simultaneously validating them across multiple tissue sections within a single experiment,” said Michal Lipinski, a senior research scientist at the institute. Illumina has also tapped the Broad Institute for a pilot research project, focused on applying spatial transcriptomics to hundreds of samples provided by the institute’s investigators.
Jasmine Plummer, director of the Center for Spatial Omics at St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, will present research examining changes in prostate tumor tissue. “Spatial omics provides the blueprint of the tissue, the pavement of the extracellular matrix, and the architecture of the cell,” Plummer said. “This visibility can provide significant insight into cancer progression.”
Finally, Darren Segale, Illumina’s senior director of scientific research, will discuss how a spatial transcriptomic map of the pregnant mouse brain showed regionally distinct gene regulation related to maternal behavior.