Researchers awarded the Millennium Technology Prize

Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman Credit: University of Cambridge British duo Professor Shankar Balasubramanian and Professor David Klenerman have been awarded the Millennium Technology Prize for their development of revolutionary DNA sequencing techniques. University of Cambridge chemists Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman have been jointly awarded the 2020 Millennium Technology Prize , one of the world's most prestigious science and technology prizes, by Technology Academy Finland (TAF). The global prize, awarded at two-year intervals since 2004 to highlight the impact of science and innovation on society, is worth €1 million. Of the nine previous winners of the Millennium Technology Prize, three have subsequently gone on to win a Nobel 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. The announcement of the 2020 award was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Professors Balasubramanian and Klenerman co-invented 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 co-founded the company Solexa to make the technology available to the world.