Professor Sir Shankar Balasubramanian earns Royal Society of Chemistry’s Khorana Prize for quadruplex DNA research

Professor Sir Shankar Balasubramanian, from Cambridge, has won the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Khorana Prize in recognition of brilliance in research and innovation.

Based at the University of Cambridge, Prof Sir Balasubramanian won the prize for groundbreaking work on the chemistry and chemical biology of nucleic acids, which has helped to transform our understanding of quadruplex DNA.

He will receive £3,000 and a medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

“For the past 27 years, my lab has focused on the chemistry, biological presence and functional significance of G-quadruplexes in human cells. These structures can form in genomic regions that regulate gene activity, suggesting they play a role in controlling whether genes are turned on or off,” said Prof Sir Balasubramanian, who is famed for establishing modern DNA sequencing technology with Prof Sir David Klenerman.

While DNA generally forms the now-familiar two-stranded double helix, in which the four DNA building blocks link across the strands through specific hydrogen bonded base pairs – guanine (G) pairing with cytosine (C), and adenine (A) pairing with thymine (T) - a distinct four-stranded secondary structure called a G-quadruplex can also form in certain G-rich regions of DNA, or RNA. In these structures, four guanine bases hydrogen-bond together in a planar arrangement known as a G-tetrad.

“Our current view is that G-quadruplexes appear to represent a previously unrecognised mechanism for regulating gene expression and cellular states. G-quadruplex formation is often associated with genes that are highly active in cancer,” said Prof Sir Balasubramanian.

“Small, drug-like molecules that selectively bind to G-quadruplex structures have shown promising anti-cancer activity and have the potential to target a wide range of cancers without the extreme toxicities associated with standard chemotherapies.”

Prof Sir Balasubramanian was among the winners of the society’s Research and Innovation Prizes.

He said: “This prize recognises a large body of work carried out by many talented students and postdocs who worked in my lab over the past two decades. I am honoured to receive it on behalf of everyone who has contributed.”