Indian-origin Cambridge professor gets top UK prize
Monday, 05 April 2010, 15:53 IST   |    13 Comments
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Indian-origin Cambridge professor gets top UK prize
London: An Indian-origin professor at the University of Cambridge, is named the Innovator of the Year by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). BBSRC is one of the leading funding agencies for research and training in non-clinical life sciences in UK. Professor Shankar Balasubramanian, who was born in Chennai in 1966, has been awarded the prize, worth 10,000 pounds, for his work on Solexa sequencing, the high speed genome sequencing technology that means it is now possible to sequence a human genome for less than $10,000. Subramanian, who moved to the UK with his parents in 1967, completed his undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge and then carried out a PhD under the supervision of Professor Chris Abell. In the mid-90s, Professors Balasubramanian and David Klenerman of the Department of Chemistry recognised the need for low cost, high throughput sequencing that would enable researchers to undertake large-scale projects. After conceiving various ideas involving DNA sequencing chemistry and detection systems, they founded the spin-out company Solexa to commercialise their inventions in 1998. In 2007 Solexa was acquired by the US company Illumina for USD 600 million, making it one of the greatest commercialisation success stories to emerge from the University of Cambridge, reports PTI.

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