Illumina expands Billion Cell Atlas with Formation Bio, two others

The Illumina Billion Cell Atlas represents a shift in how drug discovery leverages biological data at scale. Launched in January 2026, the program was built to address bottlenecks across drug development: identifying what targets to pursue, understanding why drugs succeed or fail, and selecting the right patient populations for clinical trials. The addition of Formation Bio and two other AI-driven companies signals confidence that machine-learning models trained on large, diverse biological datasets can improve the rigor of asset selection—a critical decision point where many first-in-class medicines fail because their target biology is compelling but clinical evidence is sparse.

Formation Bio's stated model—acquiring promising drugs close to or in the clinic and using AI to develop them faster—aligns directly with what the Atlas enables: using single-cell perturbation data to build more precise models of how candidate drugs interact with disease biology and to identify patient subgroups most likely to respond. By integrating the Atlas's cell-state-specific data with genetic, translational, and clinical evidence, developers can more rigorously credential target-indication pairs before investing in expensive clinical trials. This capability is particularly valuable for first-in-class programs, where the clinical precedent is limited and the stakes are high.