Cambridge University professors Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman have been declared joint winners of 2020 Millennium Technology prize. Regarded as one of the most prestigious global science and technology prizes, the award is often referred to as Finland’s version of the Nobel science prizes. The chemists received the honour for developing a super-fast DNA sequencing technique that paved the way for revolutionary healthcare advances.
The duo took home the 1 million euro ($1.22 million) Millennium Technology Prize for their work over 27 years creating ever faster and cheaper ways to sequence the human genome.
The prize, awarded by Technology Academy Finland (TAF) at two-year intervals since 2004 – when Sir Tim Berners-Lee was honoured for his discovery of the World Wide Web – to highlight the extensive impact of science and innovation on the wellbeing of society, is worth Euro 1 million, news agency PTI reported.
Sir Balasubramanian, an India-born British professor of medicinal chemistry, and Sir Klenerman, a British biophysical chemist, co-invented the Solexa-Illumina Next Generation DNA Sequencing (NGS), technology enabling fast, accurate, low-cost and large-scale genome sequencing – the process of determining the complete DNA sequence of an organism”s make-up, which is proving crucial in humanity’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
The duo went on to co-found the company Solexa to make the technology more broadly available to the world. Solexa was started with an aim to make technology broadly available to everyone in the world. The technology they co-founded has now helped them to track and explore the viral mutation of COVID.
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“This is the first time we’ve received an international prize that recognises our contribution to developing the technology – but it’s not just for us, it”s for the whole team that played a key role in the development of the technology and for all those that have inspired us on our journey,” the winning scientists said in a joint statement.
