Overview
- David Klenerman, Shankar Balasubramanian and Pascal Mayer were named winners on Wednesday in Oviedo after a 17-member jury chose them from 56 candidacies, with the €50,000 award due at the October ceremony.
- The prize cites next-generation sequencing, a method that reads many DNA fragments in parallel on a chip and slashed the cost and time of a genome from years and billions to hours and about $1,000.
- Klenerman and Balasubramanian developed the Solexa approach later commercialized by Illumina, while Mayer contributed surface DNA amplification that allowed the platform to scale to billions of reads.
- The technology now supports cancer and rare-disease diagnosis, prenatal testing and ecological studies, and it enabled rapid COVID-19 identification, vaccine design and tracking of new variants.
- In practice, DNA is chopped into small pieces, fixed to a surface, copied into dense clusters, read by flashes of light that mark each base and then rebuilt by software into a full sequence.