Sovereign AI supports IMU Biosciences to build population-scale immune datasets
Creating strategic assets that can unlock new opportunities for British AI
Sovereign AI is supporting IMU Biosciences with £1.57 million through the first round of our Strategic Assets Programme.
Strategic Assets is part of Sovereign AI's non-equity offer to British AI startups, alongside access to compute and procurement opportunities. It is designed to help build shared datasets, infrastructure and capabilities that are difficult for individual companies to create alone, but which could unlock opportunities for a much wider group of companies and institutions.
The ambition is to create assets that become more valuable over time, strengthening the foundations of the UK's AI ecosystem and helping British companies move faster and compete globally.
IMU Biosciences and UK Biobank: unlocking population-scale immune data
We're supporting IMU Biosciences with a £1.57 million award to help create a new, high-resolution picture of the human immune system at population scale, in collaboration with UK Biobank.
The wider project will profile 80,000 blood samples from UK Biobank participants, generating more than 100 million immune data points from each sample. The resulting dataset will add a detailed immune profiling layer to UK Biobank's existing genomic, clinical, imaging and lifestyle data.
This will provide researchers and companies with a much richer picture of how immune variation relates to disease risk, progression, treatment response and long-term health.
The scale of the project could create a valuable new resource for companies working across biological foundation models, drug discovery and AI-enabled healthcare, supporting new approaches to target discovery, drug development and healthcare.
The project has already attracted support from industry and academia, including Isomorphic Labs and Basecamp Research, alongside collaboration with UK Biobank and technology partners Waters Corporation and Ultima Genomics.
Why strategic assets matter
The strongest technology ecosystems are built around more than great companies. They also depend on the data, infrastructure and capabilities that allow those companies to move faster and go further.
In AI and life sciences, some of the most valuable assets are difficult to create. They can require significant upfront investment, specialist expertise, access to unique datasets and collaboration across multiple organisations.
Once created, their value can extend far beyond the organisation that built them.
That is the opportunity for Strategic Assets. Sovereign AI can help bring important projects like IMU's forward, creating resources that can support a much wider ecosystem of British companies and researchers.
In IMU's case, the £1.57 million award will create a dataset with the potential to support future research, products and discoveries across multiple organisations.
We're excited to be supporting IMU Biosciences as it builds this important new asset for the UK's AI and life sciences ecosystem, and look forward to seeing the companies, researchers and discoveries that build on it.
This is just the first round of our Strategic Assets Programme. We'll be announcing more projects in the weeks and months ahead, building a growing base of strategic assets that will strengthen the foundations of the UK's AI ecosystem.