David Liu receives Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
Liu is honored for the development of base editing and prime editing, two gene editing technologies transforming medicine.
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Gene editing pioneer David Liu, a core member at the ӳý where he is the Richard Merkin Professor and director of the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, has been named a laureate of the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. The organization has honored Liu for the development of the gene editing platforms base editing and prime editing, which can correct the vast majority of known disease-causing genetic variations and have already been used in at least 15 clinical trials, with life-saving results. Base editing was recently used to achieve the first-ever correction of a disease-causing mutation in patients.
Liu and other prize recipients were announced on April 5, 2025, at the 11th annual Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Los Angeles.
Base editing, which Liu’s team developed in 2016, is a gene editing technique that directly converts an individual DNA base pair into a different base pair. Prime editing, which Liu’s group pioneered three years later, can make insertions, deletions, and substitutions up to hundreds of base pairs long in the genome.
Since their initial development, both base editing and prime editing have been used by thousands of laboratories around the world and have enabled the study and potential treatment of many genetic diseases.
The is one of the world’s most important science awards. David Liu is one of eight winners in the life sciences category, and is the second ӳý scientist to win the award. In 2013, ӳý founding director Eric S. Lander was among the inaugural recipients of the prize.
“The real heroes behind our work are the incredibly talented graduate students, postdocs, and collaborators who worked tirelessly to develop these technologies in ways that would allow them to benefit society,” said David Liu. “Without their dedication, this work would not be possible. The honor of my professional life is to be able to work with and support such a vibrant group of scientists.”
“David is an amazing scientist and technologist, and he is dedicated to seeing the innovations in his lab impact the lives of patients,” said Todd Golub, director of the ӳý. “This prize speaks to the quality and creativity of his work. It is an honor that is well deserved.”
“It has been my privilege to support David’s work over the years,” said Dr. Richard Merkin, CEO and Founder of Heritage Provider Network, one of the country’s largest physician-owned integrated health care systems. “He is one of the most extraordinary scientists I have ever met. He has a clear vision for his work and is committed to seeing it improve human health. I’m delighted to see him recognized in this way.”
Liu, who is also the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator, graduated first in his class at Harvard College in 1994. During his doctoral research at University of California Berkeley, Liu initiated the first general effort to expand the genetic code in living cells. He earned his PhD in 1999 and became assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University in the same year. Liu became an HHMI investigator in 2005 and joined the JASONs, academic science advisors to the US government, in 2009. In 2016, he became a core institute member at the ӳý.
Liu has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the 2022 King Faisal Prize Laureate in Medicine, and the recipient of the 2024 Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine. He has published more than 275 papers and is the inventor on more than 110 issued US patents. He has earned several University-wide distinctions for teaching at Harvard, including the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, the Roslyn Abramson Award, and a Harvard College Professorship.
His research accomplishments have earned distinctions including the ASGCT Outstanding Achievement Award, the Ian Scott Medal for Excellence in Biological Chemistry Research, the Ronald Breslow Award for Biomimetic Chemistry, the American Chemical Society David Perlman Award, ACS Chemical Biology Award, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, the Arthur Cope Young Scholar Award, the NIH Marshall Nirenberg Lecturer, and awards from the Sloan Foundation, Beckman Foundation, NSF CAREER Program, and Searle Scholars Program. In 2016, 2020, and 2021, he was named one of the Top 20 Translational Researchers in the world by Nature Biotechnology, and was named one of Nature’s 10 researchers in the world. He is the founder or co-founder of several biotechnology and therapeutics companies including Beam Therapeutics, Prime Medicine, Editas Medicine, Pairwise Plants, nChroma Bio, and Exo Therapeutics.
Since its founding in 2013 by Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Anne Wojcicki, the Breakthrough Prize has been given to standout individuals in life sciences, mathematics, and fundamental physics. Along with Liu, this year’s recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences are Daniel J. Drucker (University of Toronto and Sinai Health, Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute), Joel Habener (Harvard University), Jens Juul Holst (Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research and the Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Copenhagen), Lotte Bjerre Knudsen (Novo Nordisk), Svetlana Mojsov (Rockefeller University), Alberto Ascherio (Harvard University), and Stephen L. Hauser (University of California, San Francisco).
