[Market Focus] Somagen Secures Contract for US Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation Project

Somagen is showing strong performance. This appears to be influenced by the news that the company has secured a contract for services related to the Billion Cells Project from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation (CZI) in the United States.

As of April 21, Somagen was trading at 4,235 KRW, up 815 KRW (23.83%) from the previous trading day.

On this day, Somagen announced that it had secured its first contract for single cell analysis services in the Billion Cells Project, which CZI has been promoting since 2025.

CZI, based in California, was founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

The Billion Cells Project led by CZI is a global initiative to generate an unprecedented dataset of one billion cells in order to accelerate the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) models in the field of biology. Upon completion, the project is expected to provide important new data and solutions to various biological fields through its single cell datasets.

The data generated by the Billion Cells Project will be used to train new virtual cell models through CZI's computing systems, enabling deeper insights into vast datasets. CZI plans to release the results of this project as open source, supporting scientists around the world in making new discoveries about human biology.

Prior to securing the Billion Cells Project contract, Somagen introduced the latest global sequencing platform UG100™ from Ultima Genomics, a global genomics analysis company, in December of last year. In March of this year, Somagen obtained Certified Service Provider (CSP) certification and announced the launch of the UG100™ service. The company succeeded in winning a UG100™ service contract just one month after its launch.

Hong Soo, CEO of Somagen, stated, "By actively utilizing the latest global sequencing analysis platform, UG100™, we will significantly expand sales in various multi-omics application fields, including new businesses such as single cell and spatial biology, as well as cancer genomics research." He added, "We plan to provide the best single cell analysis services to secure additional contracts in the ongoing Billion Cells Project."