PIO scientist’s genome work has key role in Covid battle

MELBOURNE: From the $1 billion and 13 years it took to sequence one human genome in 2000, they brought the cost down to less than $1,000 now. Chemists Sir Shankar Balasubramanian (in picture) and Sir David Klenerman from Cambridge University were awarded the bi-annual Millennium Technology Prize on May 18 for their service to humanity during the pandemic. It is the world’s largest tech prize, earlier awarded to the likes of Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web.
Chennai-born Balasubramanian and Klenerman started developing the Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) in 2006. On January 10 last year, NGS was used to map the SARS-CoV-2 genome at Fudan University in Shanghai. Just 25 days on, Moderna developed its vaccine, aided by this technology. “NGS helped in the pandemic because it can map a large number of viruses and we can see how it is mutating,” said Klenerman.
The duo thinks that NGS is still in its infancy, because once technology is democratised, “users get creative”.
“We are only scratching the surface of what is possible,” Chennai-born Balasubramanian told TOI.
Balasubramanian said, “(We see) vaccines offer strong protection against the new variant B.1.617. It is preliminary but important information. This suggests every country in the world needs to keep pushing its vaccination programme because, so far, it seems to be very effective.”
The origins of NGS go back nearly 25 years when the two were collaborating as independent researchers. “We were not trying to sequence anything or develop technology but the way we were approaching the problem led us to seeing a new way to sequence DNA,” Balasubramanian said.
NGS sets up millions of fragments of DNA from a sample on to the surface of a chip in an array. They are then amplified. Each fragment is decoded on that chip using fluorescent coloured nucleotides (building blocks of DNA and RNA). The colour-coded nucleotides are detected over and over, mapping the DNA sequence of each fragment. Because this is done with many fragments at the same time, it is fast, inexpensive and scalable.
In 1998, Balasubramanian and Klenerman founded Solexa and put together a team to take what they had found and make the technology workable. In 2006, Solexa did just that. The year after, Illumina acquired Solexa and finetuned the technology.
On January 10 last year, NGS was used to map the SARS-CoV-2 genome at Fudan University in Shanghai. Just 25 days on, Moderna developed its vaccine, aided by this technology. “NGS helped in the pandemic because it can map a large number of viruses and we can see how it is mutating,” said Klenerman. Balasubramanian said, “(We see) vaccines offer strong protection against the new variant B.1.617. It is preliminary but important information. This suggests every country in the world needs to keep pushing its vaccination programme because, so far, it seems to be very effective.”
And it’s not just Covid-19. NGS is also making breakthroughs in cancer and rare diseases. “Sequencing the genome of a tumour provides information specific to that tumour in that individual,” said Balasubramanian. “Then, unfortunately, some children are born with rare diseases that are difficult to diagnose and treat. Now, we can sequence the genes of parents and children to find the differences. One specific gene may have gone wrong and finding that leads to diagnosis and treatment,” said Klenerman.