On Sept. 9, 2021, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founding sponsors announced the 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 Karik�, 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.