David Klenerman, Shankar Balasubramanian and Pascal Mayer 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. Before the developments made by these three researchers, sequencing a complete human genome could require months and cost millions of dollars. Now it can be done in a day; that is, more than a million times faster and for less than a thousand dollars. This technology is based on massive parallel DNA sequencing, which allows billions of genes to be read at once: it breaks the genome into small fragments or clusters of DNA, creates thousands of copies of them and groups them into a kind of island. When combined, they can be read simultaneously and more easily using fluorescence techniques. These technologies have become the most widely-used genetic sequencing method in the world and have revolutionized research in cell biology, ecology, biomedicine and forensic medicine. Furthermore, this method has opened up new fields of research, such as the study of the human microbiome, and has a growing number of applications in clinical practice in infectious diseases, cancer and rare diseases. It has also led to the first next-generation sequencer (MiSeq) for clinical diagnostics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Solexa/Illumina sequencing is used in projects such as the International Cancer Genome Project and Genomics England for the British National Health Service.

In addition, in recent years Balasubramanian has made significant contributions in the field of nucleic acid chemistry, structure and function, and in epigenetics. Klenerman has made important contributions to microscopy that allow obtaining high-resolution 3D images of living cells and protein folding, and to the study of the accumulations of protein plaques characteristic of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Mayer works on the application of AI in the search for therapeutic substances.

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