Illumina unveiled the Billion Cell Atlas at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, launching what it calls the world’s largest genome‑wide genetic perturbation dataset designed to accelerate AI-driven drug discovery. The Atlas is the first installment of a planned five‑billion‑cell resource and already counts AstraZeneca, Merck and Eli Lilly as founding participants. Illumina said the dataset will link genetic perturbations across ~200 cell lines to cellular outcomes, enabling pharma partners to validate targets and train large foundation models for virtual cell biology. The company plans iterative releases as it scales to the billion‑cell milestone and signaled commercial availability for partner use during the rollout. By providing standardized, perturbation‑heavy single‑cell data, the Atlas aims to address the data bottleneck that limits AI model generalizability in early discovery. Illumina positioned the resource as a practical bridge from genomic signals to mechanistic biology that can be tested experimentally and in silico.