On Sept. 22, 2021, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founding sponsors announced the 2022 winners of the 10th annual Breakthrough Prizes, awarding a total of $15.75 million to an esteemed group of laureates and early-career scientists. Two of the prizes were for COVID-19 breakthroughs that played a significant role in that response.

The innovative vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that have proven effective against the virus rely on decades of work by Drew Weissman and Katalin Kariko, at the Perelman School of Medicine. Convinced of the promise of mRNA therapies despite widespread skepticism, they created a technology that has been not only vital in the fight against the coronavirus, but holds vast promise for future vaccines and treatments for a wide range of diseases including HIV, cancer, autoimmune and genetic diseases.

Additionally, the almost immediate identification and characterization of the virus, rapid development of vaccines, and real-time monitoring of new genetic variants would have been impossible without the next generation sequencing technologies invented by Shankar Balasubramanian, David Klenerman and Pascal Mayer. Before their inventions, re-sequencing a full human genome could take many months and cost millions of dollars; today, it can be done within a day at the cost of around $600.