2026 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical & Scientific Research

Presented in 2000, the sequencing of the human genome was the result of a decade and a half of research. Genomes are now sequenced in just a few hours. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which caused the COVID-19 pandemic, was thus identified and sequenced extremely quickly, allowing vaccines to be ready to prevent infection in less than a year and the response to the emergence of new variants to be equally immediate. This advance was made possible by next-generation DNA sequencing technologies, developed at the end of the last century by Balasubramanian, Klenerman and Mayer. Through the biotechnology company they named Solexa (now Illumina), the first two created a fast, cheap and efficient commercial method of genome sequencing, one of whose key components was the solid-phase DNA amplification (SPA) developed by Pascal Mayer.