June 6, 2025 – Press release
Myllia Biotechnology announced today a major technological breakthrough with the launch of VISTA™, the first platform enabling genome-wide CRISPR screens in primary human macrophages and dendritic cells. This achievement marks a significant milestone in immunology and drug target discovery, thus overcoming a long-standing barrier in the study of key innate immune cell types.
Macrophages and dendritic cells are central regulators of innate immunity, with critical roles in autoimmunity, inflammation, cancer, and infectious disease. Despite their importance, genome-wide CRISPR screening in these primary human cells has been out of reach – until now.
“Macrophages and dendritic cells are exceptionally challenging to tackle. They are sensitive, short-lived, and notoriously difficult to transduce. Overcoming these obstacles has required years of iterative development at the intersection of CRISPR technology, single-cell genomics, and primary cell culture. With VISTA™, we’ve created a robust, scalable system that finally unlocks high-content functional screening in these critical immune cell types.”
Dr. Tilmann Buerckstuemmer, Chief Scientific Officer at Myllia.
A new drug discovery pathway to immune-related diseases
VISTA™ enables unbiased CRISPR perturbations in primary human macrophages and dendritic cells, combined with single-cell readouts to map gene function at unprecedented depth and precision. It captures the biology where it really happens – in primary human cells – and facilitates unbiased CRISPR screens at genome-scale. This platform opens vast opportunities for identifying novel drug targets across a broad spectrum of immune-related diseases.
“We believe this technology will catalyze the next wave of immunology-driven drug discovery. It turns a previously inaccessible cellular system into one of the most powerful models for therapeutic exploration. The proof-of-concept screens that validated VISTA™’s capabilities were made possible, in part, through a collaboration with Ultima Genomics, a leader in next-generation sequencing. Myllia’s VISTA™ platform generates vast amounts of data, and Ultima’s sequencing platform provided the high-throughput, cost-efficient performance required for the project.”
Dr. Tilmann Buerckstuemmer, Chief Scientific Officer at Myllia.
“We are proud to support such an important milestone for Myllia’s VISTA™ platform with Ultima’s unique high-throughput and low-cost sequencing technology. Myllia’s end-to-end genome-wide CRISPR screening platform represents an enormous opportunity in biotechnology, enabled by the combination of Myllia’s capabilities and Ultima’s unique sequencing technology. This is a great example of a large and impactful application that can be unlocked, in part, through sequencing data at scale, high-throughput, and low cost, and why we built our unique sequencing technology.”
Gilad Almogy, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Ultima Genomics.
Myllia is now seeking a strategic partner for an exclusive collaboration to deploy the VISTA™ platform across a range of disease areas with the goal of uncovering and validating novel drug targets that could lead to the next-generation of immune-modulating therapies.
