On May 1, 2025 Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ: ILMN), and Ovation.io, Inc., an organization dedicated to building best-in-class multiomics datasets, reported the development of the largest commercially available clinical multiomic dataset from 25,000 patients treated with glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist therapies (Press release, Illumina, MAY 1, 2025, View Source [SID1234652464]). The dataset will be made available to the pharma community to advance drug discovery and development. This collaboration is the latest in a series of efforts to partner across the ecosystem, and deploy multimodal data to advance a deeper understanding of biology.
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One in eight adults in the United States have used a GLP-1 receptor agonist, according to a 2024 health tracking poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation. However, roughly 40% of users with Type 2 diabetes do not respond effectively to GLP-1 receptor agonists, according to a study published in Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome in 2024. The collaboration aims to accelerate GLP-1 therapy development, indication expansion research, and discovery of novel biomarkers and drug targets in nonresponsive populations.
"The power of whole-genome and multiomic insights to impact all diseases is coming into focus, and metabolic disease is a prime example," said Todd Christian, senior vice president of Services, Arrays, and Genomic Access at Illumina. "This collaboration and its novel clinical dataset will be crucial to advancing the next wave of these potential life-changing therapies, and ensuring more patients can benefit from them."
Through a multiyear agreement, Illumina and Ovation are launching an integrated dataset of phenotypic, genomic, and proteomic data from patients treated with GLP-1 therapies, including therapy-responsive and nonresponsive populations. This critical dataset is designed to enable deeper understanding of molecular pathways involved in GLP-1 response, which can unlock new indications where GLP-1 therapies may be effective, as well as new biomarkers and drug targets for patients who do not respond to GLP-1 therapies today.
"We’re proud to collaborate with Illumina to develop one of the world’s largest WGS omics datasets, supporting the millions of patients with diabetes and obesity," said Marty Miller, chief revenue officer of Ovation. "Through this effort—and for the first time at scale with the inclusion of proteomics—we aim to equip the pharmaceutical industry with the insights needed to better understand the varying effectiveness and side effects of GLP-1 receptor agonists across individual patients."
The initiative leverages end-to-end Illumina NGS technologies to sequence 25,000 whole genomes and to profile the protein expression of 5000 samples, using the Illumina Protein Prep (IPP) assay, which detects 9500 human proteins per sample. The initiative aims to include a longitudinal subset of proteomes from paired samples collected before and after patient exposure to GLP-1 therapy.
IPP enables the discovery of new protein quantitative trait loci (pQTL), which are emerging as a vital tool for drug discovery, linking genetic variation with protein expression data and disease or other phenotypes. The pQTL dataset is processed using Illumina’s industry-leading DRAGEN secondary analysis and the newly released Illumina Connected Multiomics for tertiary analysis and visualizations. The data is stored for future large-scale studies in Illumina Connected Analytics.
Ovation is providing samples from its biobank of over 1.7 million de-identified, consented, and tokenized samples, linked to rich, longitudinal phenotypic data.
Ovation announced an original agreement with Illumina in 2024, aimed at addressing challenges in drug development through genomic data solutions. The initial phase of the collaboration focused on creating pilot datasets from patients with liver disease, chronic kidney disease, and patients treated with GLP-1 receptor agonists. The companies plan to explore opportunities to scale the GLP-1 dataset and generate others in the future.