DNA is the blueprint that defines every living system on the planet not just human beings so it's
fundamental to life and now we have a method for reading and interpreting this information at scale.
Over 20 years ago David and I were doing basic blue skies research and the discovery that we made
led on to a method for reading the code of DNA , sequencing the DNA in a way that could be done
much faster and cheaper than could be done before.
This was a project to have DNA attached
to a surface and watch in real time an enzyme called DNA polymerase adding a bases into the
DNA and the problem was that we kept on missing the process and had to do the experiment again
and I was thinking about if we could do this in this very paralleled way using a camera we might
be able to we can't miss and we could always we could always capture the process. And when we were
thinking about this at this in the background the whole human genome project was taking off which
is the determining the sequence of the average human, not an individual human.
We used to have an
informal discussions with our co-workers sometimes down the pub and one August evening in the
Panton Arms we suddenly saw the pieces of the jigsaw come together that led us to see a way
of sequencing DNA that could be scalable, massively scalable.
I wrote down on a piece of A4 a very simple calculation
if we image these colour coded bases how fast we could possibly sequence DNA
and left that and Shankar's pigeon hole and for me that that was I suddenly realised that
our technology could sequence DNA about a thousand-fold faster than the current technology.
Now that was at a time when standard technology could read of the order of a hundred
thousand bases per experiment.
So we realised it had potential but we hadn't actually done
anything so we sort of pre-proof of concept . So we got advice from Alan Munro who was
the Master of Christ's at the time and he put us in touch with a venture capital company called
Abingworth. So we went through about nine months of due diligence. This this was potentially so
revolutionary but potentially so risky what to do and eventually they decided to fund us at a
very modest level funding two Postdocs in the Chemistry Department and we built up from there.
So the company we founded we called it Solexa, generated its first system in 2006 called the 1G
genome analyser it was called that because 1G is a giga base ,a billion base sequencer.
and so Illumina which is an American company became interested in in collaborating with Solexa
and they acquired the company and the technology and what they did was take that technology
and improve it further by another thousand to ten thousand fold, which is remarkable.
So I think the reason our technology is used so widely over the world is we one of the first companies to
commercialise it and the way it works very much mimics how nature copies DNA and it's highly
accurate because we differ in one base in a thousand between each individual.
Life Sciences researchers have actually invented applications of the technology
certainly I never dreamt of back in the 90s so that's what happens when you put technology
into the hands of smart creative research people.
So I think for me the this is it that this has really made a difference
was when I saw this BBC news article where they had employed
our technology to sequence a new-born baby and their parents and this new-born baby unfortunately
had some rare disease and by comparing the sequence of the baby to the parents they could work out which
DNA base had was altered. Fortunately in this case they could work out a treatment for this
particular pathway that was failing and so that the baby could go home with its their parents and
the parents were delighted obviously and I just realised wow you know it's not just the technology
for scientists it's actually a technology that can make a difference.
We're now in a position to start
integrating this technology and the information that it generates into national healthcare systems
and certainly in places like the UK where we have Genomics England which is part of the
government-funded wing of the NHS, the idea is to bring genomic technology and data to
the National Health Service.
The vision is the idea of preventative medicine where
you have your sequence determined you would know what diseases you're predisposed to
and you'll be monitored for those diseases and treated before the disease has become
very severe, so that that would be the vision.
I think what surprised me is how we literally
went from a piece of paper to something that's used all over the world
in just under 10 years. And that just I wouldn't have expected things to move that fast and have so
much impact in such a short length of time and I think that that's a large contributor to the
excellent team of people who have been involved in the project since its beginning.
The UK has really led the world I think over a long history in the development of genomics and its
application and I think again, linking to the work that David and I did it all began with a taxpayer
funded research grant here in the UK and without that funding none of this would have happened.