David Liu receives prestigous Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

David Liu is honoured for the development of base editing and prime editing, two gene editing technologies transforming medicine.

Gene editing pioneer David Liu, a core member at the Broad Institute 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 honoured 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.

David is one of the CureHeart PIs and his gene editing technologies, base and prime editing, are central to our programme of work which aims to develop cures for cardiomyopathies.

Base editing, which David’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 David’s group pioneered three years later, can make insertions, deletions, and substitutions up to hundreds of base pairs long in the genome.

The Breakthrough Prize is one of the world’s most important science awards. David Liu is one of eight winners in the life sciences category.

“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 honour of my professional life is to be able to work with and support such a vibrant group of scientists.”