Myllia Biotechnology has unveiled its groundbreaking VISTA™ platform, which is the first technology to enable genome-wide CRISPR screens directly in primary human macrophages and dendritic cells, thus resolving a long-standing hurdle in immunology and drug target discovery. These crucial innate immune cells, despite their central roles in autoimmunity, inflammation, cancer, and infectious disease, have historically been challenging for high-throughput genomic studies due to their sensitivity, short lifespan, and difficulty in transduction; however, Myllia's VISTA™ overcomes these obstacles through years of iterative development at the intersection of CRISPR technology, single-cell genomics, and primary cell culture, creating a robust and scalable system for unbiased CRISPR perturbations combined with single-cell readouts to map gene function with unprecedented depth and precision, thereby capturing biological insights directly where they occur in primary human cells.

This innovative platform, validated through proof-of-concept screens in collaboration with Ultima Genomics, which provided the necessary high-throughput and cost-efficient sequencing capabilities for the vast amounts of data generated, is expected to catalyze the next wave of immunology-driven drug discovery by transforming a previously inaccessible cellular system into one of the most powerful models for therapeutic exploration, opening up vast opportunities for identifying and validating novel drug targets across a wide range of immune-related diseases. Myllia is now actively seeking a strategic partner for an exclusive collaboration to deploy the VISTA™ platform across various disease areas, aiming to uncover and validate novel drug targets that could lead to the next generation of immune-modulating therapies.