Breakthrough Prize

Founded in 2013 by a group that includes Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences acknowledges “transformative advances toward understanding living systems and extending human life.” Commonly considered to be Silicon Valley’s answer to the Nobel Prize, the award comes with a $3 million prize.

• Swee Lay Thein (2026). For research that transformed the devastating blood disorders sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia from incurable to treatable conditions through gene editing therapy.
• Bryan Traynor (2026). For solving a decades-old mystery in neurodegenerative disease by discovering the most common genetic cause of both amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second leading cause of early-onset dementia.
• Ellen Sidransky and Andrew Singleton (2024). For identifying GBA1 and LRRK2 as risk genes for Parkinson’s disease, implicating autophagy and lysosomal biology as critical contributors to the pathogenesis of the disease.
• Richard Youle (2021). For elucidating a quality control pathway that clears damaged mitochondria and thereby protects against Parkinson’s Disease.