Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman outside the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry taken by Nathan Pitt ©University of Cambridge
Professor Sir Shankar Balasubramanian and Professor Sir David Klenerman were honoured in the 2024 class of National Inventors Hall of Fame Inductees.
Professor Sir Shankar Balasubramanian and Professor Sir David Klenerman, who made important contributions to the development of a rapid new DNA sequencing method, were announced as 2024 Inductees in the National Inventors Hall of Fame at an event in Glendale, California, at the Walt Disney Imagineering Campus.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame has recognised extraordinary innovators for over 50 years. They will be formally inducted at a ceremony in May along with thirteen other inductees.
They have previously been awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Millennium Technology Prize for their for their role in the development of Next Generation DNA genome sequencing, which has transformed the worlds of medicine and biochemistry.
The technique, also called sequencing-by-synthesis, allowed the rapid sequencing of the genome for the first time, and has led to more than one million human genomes being sequenced every year. In 2000, sequencing a single genome cost over £1 billion and took more than 10 years—now it costs less than £1,000 and takes just one day.
In 1998, Balasubramanian and Klenerman founded Solexa to develop and commercialise the new technology. Solexa was acquired by Illumina in 2007, and sequencing-by-synthesis is now deployed in labs across the world to identify disease genes, advance our understanding of cancers, perform non-invasive prenatal testing, and further COVID-19 research.