On May 31, 2022, Ultima Genomics emerged from stealth business mode with a new high-throughput, low-cost sequencing platform that delivers the $100 genome. Pre-prints were available on BioRxiv. Ultima’s goal is to unleash a new era in genomics-driven research and healthcare, and it had secured approximately $600 million in backing from leading investors who share this vision.

• Data from over 200 whole human genomes, generated at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which was the company’s first early access site, in addition to a co-developed update to Broad’s open-sourced GATK toolkit and the first demonstration of single cell RNA-seq methodologies from Joshua Levin and Aviv Regev, will be shared at AGBT. Pre-prints are available on BioRxiv, and reference human genome data and software will be made available to the community.
• A four million cell genome-wide PerturbSeq study, performed by Jonathan Weissman’s team at The Whitehead Institute and pending publication, demonstrates immediate usability for Ultima’s platform in large-scale single-cell studies.
• Initial clinical evaluation data, as well as Hi-C genome structure data at an unprecedented resolution, generated in collaboration with researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, will be shared at AGBT.
• Whole genome methylation landscape of pre-cancerous tissues, generated in collaboration with Michael Snyder’s lab at the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University, to be released as a pre-print on BioRxiv.
• Multiple demonstrations of the ability to quantify circulating tumor by deep whole genome sequencing of cell-free DNA, performed in collaboration with researchers from Cancer Research UK and New York Genome Center, will be presented at the conference.

Biology’s complexity and dynamic nature has created a virtually unlimited need for genomic information. Currently, routine adoption of sequencing for research and diagnosis is severely constrained by cost. Over the last five years, Ultima Genomics has developed a fundamentally new sequencing architecture designed to scale beyond conventional approaches, including completely different approaches to flow cell engineering, sequencing chemistry, and machine learning.