DNA sequencing pioneers win 1m euro tech ‘Nobel’ prize

HELSINKI: Two British chemists who developed a super-fast DNA sequencing technique that paved the way for revolutionary healthcare advances were on Tuesday awarded Finland’s version of the Nobel science prizes.

Cambridge University professors Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman 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 pair’s Next-Generation DNA Sequencing technology (NGS) “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,” the Technology Academy Finland, which awards the biennial prize, said in a statement. Twenty years ago, the first attempt to “read” the sequence of 3.2 billion letters that makes up the human genome took a decade and cost over a billion dollars. Thanks to Next Generation Sequencing the process can now be performed in one day for just $1,000 dollars, and the technology is used over a million times a year, most recently to track coronavirus mutations during the pandemic.