Breakthrough Prize 2025 Honours GLP-1 Pioneers, Gene-Editing Innovators, and CERN's Large Hadron Collider Collaborations

Los Angeles, USA · 5 April 2025 — The Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced the winners of the 2025 Breakthrough Prizes at its annual ceremony in Los Angeles, honouring scientists driving remarkable discoveries in gene editing, human diseases, the fundamental particles of the universe, and its underlying mathematical principles.

Popularly known as the "Oscars of Science," the Breakthrough Prize was created to celebrate scientific achievement by founding sponsors Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. Six Breakthrough Prizes of $3 million each were awarded in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics, bringing this year's total prize money to $18.75 million and the cumulative amount conferred over 14 years to more than $326 million.

Life Sciences: GLP-1 Hormone Discovery

Five scientists — Daniel J. Drucker, Joel Habener, Jens Juul Holst, Lotte Bjerre Knudsen, and Svetlana Mojsov — shared a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for their complementary contributions to the discovery and characterisation of GLP-1, a hormone that has transformed the treatment of diabetes and obesity.

Their collective work spans the full arc from basic hormone discovery through physiological understanding to pharmaceutical development. The breakthroughs include the discovery of the gene encoding the GLP-1 hormone; the synthesis, isolation, and characterisation of the hormone's biologically active forms; the demonstration that it is produced in the gut and stimulates insulin production; elucidation of its broader physiological roles, including control of appetite and energy homeostasis; the development of a more stable version that continues to act in the body for days rather than hours; and its translation into a new class of drugs transforming the treatment of metabolic diseases affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Life Sciences: Multiple Sclerosis

Alberto Ascherio of Harvard University and Stephen L. Hauser of the University of California, San Francisco, shared a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for transforming the understanding and treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS), a debilitating neurodegenerative disease in which the immune system attacks the insulating protein around nerve fibres.

Hauser overturned the scientific consensus on the mechanism of MS, identifying the immune system's B cells as the primary driver of damage to nerve cells. He was instrumental in the development and testing of B cell-depleting therapies, which have revolutionised modern treatment of the disease.

Through painstaking long-term epidemiological analysis, Ascherio discovered the necessary condition for developing MS: infection with the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). The majority of the population carries this pathogen, normally without severe effects, but Ascherio showed that contracting it raises the risk of developing MS by a factor of 32. This work opens the possibility of treating MS with antiviral drugs and developing a vaccine for EBV that could effectively prevent MS altogether.

Life Sciences: Gene Editing Without Cutting DNA

David R. Liu of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard received a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing two powerful, widely used gene-editing technologies: base editing and prime editing.

Unlike CRISPR-Cas9, which cuts the DNA double helix, these technologies are engineered molecular machines that correct mutations without cutting the DNA, leading to fewer unwanted outcomes. In 2016, Liu's lab developed base editing, which corrects single-letter "misspellings" that constitute about 30 percent of mutations known to cause genetic diseases. In 2019, his lab invented prime editing, which replaces whole stretches of defective DNA with a corrected version and, in principle, could repair nearly all disease-causing mutations.

These technologies have been distributed more than 20,000 times to labs around the world. At least 15 base editing and prime editing clinical trials have begun in five countries, with beneficial and, in some cases, life-saving results already confirmed in patients for the treatment of T-cell leukemia, sickle-cell disease, beta-thalassemia, and high cholesterol.

Fundamental Physics: CERN's LHC Collaborations

The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to more than 13,000 researchers from over 70 countries representing four experimental collaborations at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC): ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, and LHCb.

The $3 million prize was allocated across the four experiments — ATLAS ($1 million), CMS ($1 million), ALICE ($500,000), and LHCb ($500,000) — in recognition of 13,508 co-authors of publications based on LHC Run-2 data released between 2015 and July 2024.

In an unusual arrangement, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation donated 100 percent of the prize funds to the CERN & Society Foundation, to be used for grants enabling doctoral students from member institutes to spend research time at CERN.

The experiments were recognised for testing the Standard Model of particle physics and theories beyond it to high precision. This includes precisely measuring properties of the Higgs boson, probing extremely rare particle interactions, discovering more than 72 new hadrons, measuring subtle differences between matter and antimatter, and setting strong bounds on possibilities for new physics including dark matter, supersymmetry, and hidden extra dimensions.

Mathematics: Geometric Langlands Conjecture

Dennis Gaitsgory of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics won the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for his central role in the proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture — a monumental advance comprising over 800 pages spread across five papers, published in 2024 after more than a decade of intensive research.

The Langlands program is a broad research effort proposing precise connections between seemingly disparate mathematical concepts. The geometric Langlands conjecture proposes a one-to-one correspondence between two very different sets of objects: representations of the fundamental group (capturing information about loops that can wrap around complex surfaces) and sheaves (rules assigning vector spaces to points on a surface). The proof is expected to have deep implications in number theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics.

Special Prize: Gerard 't Hooft

A Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to Gerardus 't Hooft of Utrecht University for fundamental insights into gauge theory and the Standard Model. In the early 1970s, 't Hooft made crucial contributions proving that Yang-Mills theories — the mathematical framework underlying theories of both the weak and strong nuclear forces — produce finite, calculable results when treated quantum mechanically, validating theories central to the Standard Model.

Summary of 2025 Breakthrough Prizes

"This year's Breakthrough Prize laureates have made amazing strides — including treatments for major diseases affecting millions of people worldwide — showing once again the transformative power of curiosity-driven basic science." — Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, founding sponsors

Sources

• Breakthrough Prize Foundation, "Breakthrough Prize Announces 2025 Laureates in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics," 5 April 2025, breakthroughprize.org
• PR Newswire, "Breakthrough Prize Announces 2025 Laureates in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics, and Mathematics," April 2025
• Science Media Centre Spain, expert reactions to 2025 Breakthrough Prize laureates