Product Engineer 1

Ultima Genomics has appointed Francisco De La Vega as Vice President, Germline Genomics & Distinguished Scientific Fellow. De La Vega brings over 25 years of experience in human genetics, computational biology and bioinformatics. De La Vega previously held senior positions at Applied Biosystems, Fabric Genomics, Tempus AI and Galatea Bio. He played leading roles in the 1000 Genomes Project and International Cancer Genome Consortium, and has co-authored over 100 scientific publications with nearly 50,000 citations. At Ultima, De La Vega will drive inherited genome analysis applications across genetic diseases, population health and personalised medicine. His appointment supports Ultima's expansion into germline genomics, particularly as newborn screening, biobank sequencing and national genomics initiatives grow globally.

Basecamp Research launches Trillion Gene Atlas to scale ai-designed therapeutics. Mar 18, 2026, 05:00 ET * The Atlas will expand known evolutionary genetic diversity by 100x, collecting novel genomic data from over 100 million new species across thousands of sites globally. * By partnering with Anthropic, Ultima Genomics, and PacBio, and powered by NVIDIA AI infrastructure, Basecamp Research aims to compress over two decades of biological data gathering and analysis into less than two years. * Training the EDEN models revealed new scaling laws: as biological datasets grow larger and richer, AI capabilities jump - opening the door to systems that can design new medicines across diseases and treatment types. AUSTIN, Texas and SAN JOSE, Calif., March 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Basecamp Research, a frontier AI lab for biological design, today announced the launch of the Trillion Gene Atlas, a landmark scientific initiative to generate and model biological data at the trillion-gene scale. Launched in collaboration with Anthropic, Ultima Genomics and PacBio, and powered by NVIDIA AI infrastructure, the Trillion Gene Atlas aims to expand known evolutionary genetic diversity 100-fold by collecting genomic data from more than 100 million species across thousands of sites worldwide. This is possible thanks to Basecamp Research's growing network of global biodiversity partners. Its ultimate goal is to provide the vast, diverse training data required for AI systems to learn from evolution to design new medicines on demand. "Today's biological AI models are trained on a narrow slice of life on Earth," said Glen Gowers, Co-founder and CEO of Basecamp Research, speaking at SXSW in Austin. "The Trillion Gene Atlas expands the known genetic universe by orders of magnitude beyond what is in public databases. Training models at this scale establishes a new paradigm for programmable therapeutic design." The initiative, which is on the scale of the Human Genome Project, was unveiled during the Health Track at SXSW and the NVIDIA GTC conference in San Jose. Addressing the Biological Data Bottleneck With huge increases in model size and computing power, diverse data is a critical enabler for progress in AI drug development and real-world benchmarks. All current sequence-based foundation models rely on variants of the same public repositories, with 80% of these trained on a public database containing fewer than 250 million sequences. Basecamp Research's EDEN foundation models, released in January, bypass the industry's evolutionary "data wall" by training entirely on BaseData(TM), a proprietary genomic database that is currently more than 10 times larger than all public resources combined. By learning from an unprecedented 10 billion new-to-science genes across 1 million newly discovered species, EDEN unlocked critical new scaling laws for AI in biology. This massive expansion in dataset diversity moved EDEN beyond simple prediction, making it the first model capable of designing diverse therapeutics directly from a disease prompt. In wet-lab validation, EDEN demonstrated zero-shot activity in primary human T-cells without any human or clinical data needed. The model has successfully generated hits across multiple frontier modalities, notably pioneering AI-Programmable Gene Insertion (aiPGI) to insert healthy genes and designing targeted antimicrobial peptides with a 97% hit rate against priority pathogens. The Trillion Gene Atlas builds on this approach by greatly expanding the breadth and contextual depth of genomic data in the known "internet of biology" suitable for AI training. "Bigger models alone aren't enough," added Phil Lorenz, CTO of Basecamp Research. "EDEN showed that performance in biological AI follows much steeper scaling trajectories with higher quality and fully contextualized data. The Trillion Gene Atlas extends that principle 100-fold." Global Biodiversity Partnerships Over the past six years, Basecamp Research has built a network of scientific collaborators across 31 countries, establishing a scalable evolutionary genomics pipeline purpose-built for AI training. By pioneering a combination of new regulatory and economic frameworks and fully off-grid DNA sequencing technologies, the company collects high-quality genomic data from ecosystems beyond the reach of traditional laboratories. These partnerships are grounded in knowledge exchange, local capacity building, and equitable Access and Benefit-Sharing agreements aligned with emerging Digital Sequence Information regulations. This framework enables responsible, large-scale, high-quality genomic data collection while investing in scientific infrastructure and training within partner regions. As part of the Atlas launch, Basecamp is announcing new partnerships in Chile, Argentina and an expanded collaboration in Antarctica, further extending its global biodiversity network. Scaling Data Generation and Compute with Ultima Genomics, PacBio and NVIDIA The Trillion Gene Atlas is enabled by advances in ultra-high-throughput short- and long-read sequencing and accelerated computing. Basecamp has partnered with Ultima Genomics and PacBio to deliver industrial-scale sequencing including data-rich, high-accuracy long reads. Ultima is a developer of ultra-high throughput next- generation sequencing (NGS) systems. Ultima's latest sequencing system, the UG200 Series, advances the company's unique wafer-based sequencing architecture to enable high-throughput, whole-genome and multi-omics sequencing at an industrial scale at a low price point to enable initiatives like the Trillion Atlas. "Biology has been fundamentally data-starved when compared to other fields like language or computer vision as researchers have lacked the tools required to generate data at scale" said Gilad Almogy, Founder and CEO of Ultima Genomics. "We strongly believe that AI will have an immense impact on our understanding of biology and human health, and the UG200 Series was designed from the ground up to enable the massive datasets required for BioAI to deliver on this promise. We are excited our technology can enable Basecamp in their vision and advance innovative initiatives like the Trillion Gene Atlas." "PacBio HiFi sequencing delivers highly accurate long reads that preserve full genomic context and enables subspecies and even strain-level resolution in complex samples." said Christian Henry, President and CEO of PacBio. "HiFi data provides the reliable, information-rich foundation biological AI models need to learn from nature at scale and power initiatives like the Trillion Gene Atlas." The Trillion Gene Atlas will be powered by NVIDIA's accelerated computing infrastructure to process vast quantities of genetic data at the petabase scale. As part of this effort, Basecamp plans to leverage NVIDIA Parabricks to significantly accelerate metagenomic assembly. This collaboration focuses on both advanced engineering and the development of new algorithmic methods to optimize how complex environmental samples are reconstructed. Thanks to this acceleration, processing quadrillions of DNA base pairs, a task that would have previously taken over 20 years, is expected to take less than two years to complete. Through parallelized data processing, automated annotation, and large-scale model training, the partners expect to compress a task that previously would have required more than 20 years of processing time to less than two years. This compression of sequencing, assembly, annotation and model training is intended to expand the performance and scope of biological foundation models across therapeutic development. Creating an Agentic End-to-End Therapeutic Design Workflow Anthropic joins as part of its broader effort to add new capabilities for life sciences: connecting Claude to more scientific platforms. Working with the Claude for Life Sciences team, the aim is to harness the Trillion Gene Atlas and EDEN to make Claude an even more productive research partner for scientists and clinicians, and support organisations bringing new scientific advancements to the public. By combining Claude's advanced reasoning capabilities, EDEN's therapeutic design capabilities, and NVIDIA's CUDA-X Libraries to process unstructured data, the initiative aims to create an integrated workflow for interpreting complex clinical data and translating it directly into therapeutic design. The Trillion Gene Atlas is built on three pillars: large-scale DNA sequencing, global data supply partnerships and advanced computing. Together with AI systems capable of reasoning across complex data, these foundations can help turn vast datasets into therapeutic discoveries. By increasing the evolutionary data available to AI by another 100x, Basecamp Research aims to make drug design faster and more systematic - extending EDEN's earlier advances in fields like gene therapy and the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Ultima Genomics Introduces the subsequent era of sequencing at scale with the launch of the UG200(TM) collection and subsequent era Solaris 2.0 workflows. February 26, 2026 Ultima Genomics, Inc., a developer of ultra-high-throughput sequencing systems, continues its mission to enable sequencing at scale with the unveiling of the UG200 Series and next generation Solaris 2.0 workflows, which provide higher output, better performance and faster turnaround time with flexible wafer configurations and lower instrumentation pricing. Together, these advancements move Ultima closer to its vision of delivering sequencing at the necessary scale to drive the next era of biology and enable applications like comprehensive cancer monitoring, AI-powered discovery, and global population-scale genomics. Ultima will showcase these innovative technologies at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) Conference on February 25, 2026. "The UG200 Series and Solaris 2.0 represent a major milestone in our mission to drive sequencing at scale with another leap forward in throughput, cost, automation, and accessibility," said Gilad Almogy, founder and CEO of Ultima Genomics. "Collectively, the UG200 Series and Solaris 2.0 showcase the continued scalability and flexibility of our technology and our intense focus on driving the next era of genomics for data-hungry applications." Launching the UG200 Series with faster run times, half the footprint, and improved usability and flexibility Ultima has announced the launch of its newest generation of sequencing instruments, the UG200 and the UG200 Ultra, dramatically reducing the footprint and weight of the system with a simple and elegant design and enabling a 1-day turnaround time from library to data, for improved usability and increased scale. The UG200 Series consists of two flexible configurations allowing customers to choose the system that best matches their throughput requirements today: * The UG200 Ultra dual-wafer platform offers extreme throughput capabilities for sequencing over 60,000 whole genomes per year at 30x coverage while also preserving flexibility for smaller, faster sequencing runs. The UG200 Ultra, priced at $1,250,000, features powerful next generation compute capabilities, enabling faster data rates and a total wafer output of up to 60 wafers per week for certain applications. An optional benchtop liquid handler for the Solaris 2.0 amplification process is available at $125,000 for customers that do not wish to integrate into their existing lab automation. * The UG200 single-wafer platform expands access to Ultima's innovative wafer-based architecture with a U.S. list price as low as $850,000, not including the optional benchtop liquid handler, delivering both immediate capability and long-term scalability, and can be upgraded to the UG200 Ultra via an in-field upgrade package. The UG200 Series has been in early access and is now available for purchase with shipments beginning in the second quarter of 2026. Launching the next generation Solaris 2.0 workflows with improved genomic coverage while also enabling reduced system footprint, more operational flexibility, and improved user experience Ultima has also announced the launch of its next generation Solaris 2.0 workflows leveraging next generation amplification technology to significantly improve coverage uniformity and performance in complex regions of the genome, while continuing to deliver Ultima's extreme SNVQ-60 accuracy. These advancements result in dramatically better performance in clinically relevant regions of the genome and provide low cost and high quality for germline whole genome sequencing applications and extreme accuracy for liquid biopsy applications. Ultima's next generation amplification departs from its previous technology requiring emulsions and does not require a separate ePCR amplification station. Customers will be able to deploy the sample preparation and amplification steps of Ultima workflows directly on existing standard liquid handling platforms or purchase an out-of-the-box benchtop liquid handler optimized for Ultima's platform. In the future, Ultima will also support integration of sample preparation and amplification with a diverse array of library preparation methods providing deeper integration within existing workflows and improved operator experience. Ultima's Solaris 2.0 workflows are available for purchase today. Solaris 2.0 Max enabling more output, increased flexibility and broader compatibility coming in 2H 2026 In addition to the Solaris 2.0 workflows, Ultima is also announcing Solaris 2.0 Max, which will provide up to 20 billion reads per wafer. This ultra-high throughput wafer will be complemented with 10B "half wafer" and 5B "quarter wafer" configurations, delivering enhanced flexibility and empowering customers to scale output as needed. 20 billion reads per wafer represents a 2x increase in per wafer output relative to the existing Solaris workflows and will enable sequencing of more than 60,000 30x coverage whole genomes per year on a single UG200 Ultra instrument. The Solaris 2.0 Max workflows and 10B "half wafer" and 5B "quarter wafer" configurations will be available in the second half of 2026 with pricing to be announced ahead of launch. Ultima will also be launching paired-end sequencing capabilities to enable new application areas and provide broader workflow compatibility and improved performance in certain key applications. Paired-end capabilities will be available on the UG200 Series with details to be announced by year end. Disrupting the painful upgrade cycle: Ultima to make these advancements available to UG 100 customers Ultima remains committed to addressing pain points for sequencing customers and will support its existing customers by making the Solaris 2.0 workflows and other future innovations, such as Solaris 2.0 Max, compatible with UG 100 instruments in the field and the UG200 Series. All UG 100 customers will be able to benefit from the improved performance, flexibility and user experience enabled by these next generation workflows via in-field instrument upgrades to move to the UG 100 Plus starting immediately. With the launch of Solaris 2.0 Max, the UG 100 Plus will have nearly 4x the annual production as compared to the UG 100 at its initial commercial launch at AGBT in 2024. What customers are saying: "We have achieved a highly successful commercial implementation of Ultima sequencing in Macrogen/Psomagen, with demonstrated success in delivering large-scale single-cell sequencing projects as a designated service provider for the CZI Billion Cells Project," said Dr. Jeong-Sun Seo, Chairman and CEO of Macrogen. "We've seen continued increased demand for the high-quality and economic advantages of Ultima sequencing for a range of applications. Macrogen has now expanded the fleet of Ultima sequencers to serve the global community, with installations at Macrogen APAC in Singapore and Macrogen Europe. We're pleased to be among the first adopters of Ultima's groundbreaking Solaris 2.0 and UG200 Sequencing Platform and look forward to spearheading the global Personal Genome Sequencing Initiative with cutting-edge technologies." "We are running our UG 100 fleet in full production, handling over 100,000 whole genome samples a month," said Dr. Arjan Bormans, Chief Scientific Officer of Gene by Gene. "We only started using Ultima's new sample prep and amplification tech late last year, but it's held up - reliable, solid data, and easy to run. The smaller footprint and faster turnaround fit our high-throughput setup, and we moved it from testing to full production in under a quarter." "At Sanger, reducing the cost of sequencing is central to unlocking larger, more impactful datasets for the Institute and the wider research community," said Dr Carl Anderson, Head of Human Genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. "For the Human Genetics programme, the move from Ultima's UG 100 to the UG200 supports our mission to generate longitudinal multiomics data linked to deep phenotypes, making whole genome sequencing routine for cohorts that were previously constrained to targeted panels. The UG200 increases throughput and efficiency, supporting Sanger-wide goals for scale and impact while accelerating scientific discovery and clinical translation." "We're very excited by what Solaris 2.0 enables," said Kenny Beckman, PhD, Director, Genomics Core at University of Minnesota. "The new pre-run workflow is simpler and much faster. It will streamline operations and improve turnaround time. We've seen a marked improvement in the human WGS benchmarking F1 score, and we look forward to the more balanced genomic coverage that Solaris 2.0 will provide." #Ultima #Genomics #Introduces #Generation #Sequencing #Scale #Launch #UG200 #Series #Generation #Solaris #Workflows February 26, 2026 Keep up to date with the most important news. Add a comment Add a comment Resident evil requiem overview - there's loads of life within the undead but | video games. WATCH LIVE: rev. Jesse jackson lies in repose at rainbow PUSH coalition headquarters in chicago. February 26, 2026