DNA SEQUENCING PIONEERS WIN THE MILLENNIUM TECHNOLOGY PRIZE

• British duo Professor Shankar Balasubramanian and Professor David Klenerman have been awarded the Millennium Technology Prize for their development of revolutionary DNA sequencing techniques.
• The duo’s Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology means DNA can now be read in super-fast times.
• This means huge benefits to society, from helping the fight against killer diseases such as COVID-19 or cancer, to better understanding crop diseases and enhancing food production.
• President of the Republic of Finland Sauli Niinistö, Patron of the Prize presented the award in a virtual ceremony on 18 May 2021.

Cambridge University chemists Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman are today announced as the winners of the 2020 Millennium Technology Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious science and technology prizes, awarded by Technology Academy Finland (TAF). 

The global prize, awarded at two-year intervals since 2004 to highlight the extensive impact of science and innovation on the wellbeing of society, is worth €1 million.  Today’s announcement of the 2020 award was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Professors Balasubramanian and Klenerman co-invented the Solexa-Illumina Next Generation DNA Sequencing (NGS), technology that has enhanced our basic understanding of life, converting biosciences into “big science” by enabling fast, accurate, low-cost and large-scale genome sequencing – the process of determining the complete DNA sequence of an organism's make-up.  They then co-founded the company Solexa to make the technology more broadly available to the world.

The technology has had – and continues to have – a huge transformative impact in the fields of genomics, medicine and biology.  One measure of the scale of change is that it has allowed a million-fold improvement in speed and cost when compared to the first sequencing of the human genome.  In 2000, sequencing of one human genome took over 10 years and cost more than a billion dollars.  Today, the human genome can be sequenced in one day at a cost of $1,000 and more than a million human genomes are sequenced at scale each year, thanks to the technology co-invented by Professors Balasubramanian and Klenerman.  This means we can understand diseases much better and much more quickly.

How it works

The NGS method involves fragmenting sample DNA into many small pieces that are immobilized on the surface of a chip and locally amplified.  Each fragment is then decoded on the chip, base-by-base, using fluorescently coloured nucleotides added by an enzyme. By detecting the colour-coded nucleotides incorporated at each position on the chip with a fluorescence detector – and repeating this cycle hundreds of times – it is possible to determine the DNA sequence of each fragment.

The collected data is then analysed using sophisticated computer software to assemble the full DNA sequence from the sequence of all these fragments. The NGS method’s ability to sequence billions of fragments in a parallel fashion makes the technique fast, accurate and very cost-efficient. The invention of NGS was a completely revolutionary and novel approach to the understanding of the genetic code in all living organisms.

Helping the global fight against COVID-19

Next generation sequencing provides an effective way to study and identify new coronavirus strains and other pathogens. With the emergence of the pandemic, the technology is now being used to track and explore the novel coronavirus viral mutations, which is a growing global concern. This work has helped the creation of multiple vaccines now being administered worldwide and is critical to the creation of new vaccines against new dangerous viral strains. The results will also be used to prevent future pandemics. The International Selection Committee – the body of experts that evaluates all nominations for the prize – made its decision in February 2020, before the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The technology is also allowing scientists and researchers to identify the underlying factors in individuals that contribute to their immune response to COVID-19. This information is essential to unravelling the reason behind why some people respond much worse to the virus than others. The results of these studies will be invaluable for understanding how to minimise the chances of people developing exaggerated inflammatory responses, which is now understood as being responsible for some of the symptoms of COVID-19.

Impact on wider healthcare and diagnostics

NGS technology has revolutionised global biological and biomedical research and has enabled the development of a broad range of related technologies, applications and innovations. Due to its efficiency, NGS is now being widely adopted in healthcare and diagnostics, such as cancer, rare diseases, infectious medicine, and sequencing-based non-invasive prenatal testing.

It is increasingly used to define the genetic risk genes for patients with a rare disease and is now used to define new drug targets for novel therapies for common disease in defined patient groups. NGS has also contributed to the creation of new and powerful biological therapies like antibodies and gene therapies.

In the field of cancer, NGS is becoming the standard analytical method for defining personalised therapeutic treatment. The technology has dramatically improved our understanding of the genetic basis of many cancers at a fundamental level and is now often used both for clinical tests for early detection and diagnostics both from tumours and patients’ blood samples. 

Impact on biology

In addition to medical applications, NGS has also had a major impact on all of biology as it allows the clear identification of thousands of organisms in almost any kind of sample. This is now critically important for Agriculture, Ecology and Biodiversity studies.

Academy Professor Päivi Törmä, Chair of the Millennium Technology Prize Selection Committee, said:

“The future potential of NGS is enormous and the exploitation of the technology is still in its infancy. The technology will be a crucial element in promoting sustainable development through personalisation of medicine, understanding and fighting killer diseases, and hence improving the quality of life. Professor Balasubramanian and Professor Klenerman are worthy winners of the prize.”

This is the first time that the prize has been awarded to more than one recipient for the same innovation, celebrating the significance of collaboration.

Professor Marja Makarow, Chair of Technology Academy Finland said:

“Collaboration is an essential part of ensuring positive change for the future. Next Generation Sequencing is the perfect example of what can be achieved through teamwork and individuals from different scientific backgrounds coming together to solve a problem.

“The technology pioneered by Professor Balasubramanian and Professor Klenerman has also played a key role in helping discover the coronavirus’s sequence, which in turn enabled the creation of the vaccines – itself a triumph for cross-border collaboration – and helped identify new variants of COVID-19.”

In a joint statement, Professor Shankar Balasubramanian and Professor David Klenerman said:

“We are delighted and honoured to be the tenth recipients of the Millennium Technology Prize.  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.”

Of the nine previous winners of the Millennium Technology Prize, three have subsequently gone on to win a Nobel Prize.

Tomorrow (19 May 2021) Professors Balasubramanian and Klenerman will deliver the Millennium Technology Prize Lecture, talking about their innovation, at 16:30hrs (EEST) at the Millennium Innovation Forum. The lecture can be accessed here.

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Notes to editors:

1. Timeline of the development of Next Generation Sequencing:

1994: Professors Shankar Balasubramanian and Klenerman start their collaboration to conceive of a new method of sequencing DNA.  Their method is based on sequencing of vast numbers of DNA molecules on a surface in parallel, to make a highly miniaturised and fast DNA sequencer.

1997: Early calculations suggest the approach would be scaleable to enable sequencing of billions of DNA bases in a few days on a single instrument, allowing rapid sequencing of a human genome.

1998: To commercialise the innovation, Professors Klenerman and Balasubramanian file several key patents and co-found Solexa Ltd.  First human genome to be sequenced using the technology is published.

2007: the technology is acquired by Illumina, Inc. and further optimised to sequence trillions of DNA bases per experiment. The technology continues to have a transformative impact on the fields of genomics, biology and medicine.

2. Watch the video of the 2020 Millennium Technology Prize Winners here and download photos of the winners here.

3. The Millennium Technology Prize is a global one-million-euro award presented every second year in honour of a pioneering technological innovation that improves people’s quality of life and promotes sustainable development. The winning innovations must have extensive positive social impacts, be commercially viable and promote the welfare of humanity. The Millennium Technology Prize is awarded by Technology Academy Finland. 

4. The previous winners of the Millennium Technology Prize are:

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee (2004), for the World Wide Web;
• Professor Shuji Nakamura (2006), for the production of the first successful blue LED, the final step in creating a brilliant white LED;
• Professor Robert Langer (2008), for his work in pioneering controlled drug release where medication is released in a patient’s body over time;
• Professor Michael Grätzel (2010), for third generation dye-sensitized solar cells, which promise electricity-generating windows and low-cost solar panels;
• Joint winners (2012): Professor Shinya Yamanaka, for ethical stem cell research; and Linus Torvalds for the Linux open-source operating system, which has become the basis of Android smartphones, tablets, digital television recorders and supercomputers the world over;
• Professor Stuart Parkin (2014), for developing increased data storage density, which has enabled a thousand-fold increase in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives;
• Dr Frances Arnold (2016), for her work on directed evolution; and,
• Dr Tuomo Suntola (2018), for atomic layer deposition (ALD), that enables manufacture of nanoscale thin material layers for microprocessors and digital memory devices, which has helped revolutionise smartphones.

5. Media contacts and interview requests:
   Alex Jungwirth, Apollo Strategic Communications
   alex.jungwirth@apollostrategiccomms.com
   +44 (0) 795 895 5795

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