India-born scientist Shankar Balasubramanian has been named a recipient of the 2026 Wolf Prize in Chemistry for his contribution to the development of next-generation DNA sequencing. He shares the honour with David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer.
The trio’s work helped change the scale and speed at which genetic information could be analysed, making DNA sequencing a powerful tool for genomic medicine. According to the Wolf Foundation, the sequencing platform developed from their work now underpins more than 90 per cent of sequencing data generated globally and has contributed to advances in genomics and precision medicine.
A key breakthrough came from Balasubramanian and Klenerman’s development of a massively parallel sequencing approach. It contributed to a million-fold increase in sequencing speed while significantly reducing costs, helping bring the cost of sequencing a human genome to below $200. Mayer was instrumental in converting these advances into a high-throughput sequencing system. His contribution involved bringing together the chemistry, microfluidics, optics and computational elements needed to operate the technology on a large scale.
The Wolf Prize, awarded annually by the Wolf Foundation in Israel, is among the most prestigious international honours in chemistry and is regarded as second only to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Established in 1978, the Wolf Foundation presents six prizes covering chemistry, agriculture, mathematics, medicine, physics and arts.
Born in Madras, now Chennai, in 1966, Balasubramanian moved to the UK with his parents the following year. He is currently the Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a senior group leader at Cancer Research UK’s Cambridge Institute.
He earned a BA in Natural Sciences in 1988 and a PhD in Enzyme Chemistry in 1991, both from Cambridge, before joining its faculty in 1994. He was knighted in 2017 and has also received the Royal Medal, Millennium Technology Prize and Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences.