Riverside Native Receives $3 Million Breakthrough Prize for Gene Editing Revolution

Riverside native David R. Liu has been awarded the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, receiving $3 million for developing revolutionary gene-editing technologies that are transforming medicine.

Liu, who grew up in Riverside and graduated as valedictorian from Poly High School in 1990, was honored at a ceremony in Los Angeles on April 5 for his work developing base editing and prime editing technologies.

"It was really a huge team effort," Liu told The Boston Globe. "It's a wonderful testament to the hard work of many of the people whom I've had the honor of working with over the past 26 years."

The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Liu showed scientific promise early, finishing second in the 1990 Westinghouse Science Talent Search for using a computer to simulate how the brain processes visual information, according to the Society for Science. Though he grew up in a household with scientific influence—his father is an aerospace engineer and his mother a retired physics professor—Liu has said his parents never pushed him toward a science career, The Harvard Gazette reports. His academic excellence continued at Harvard University, where he graduated first in his class in 1994.

Liu's technologies can correct disease-causing genetic mutations without cutting the DNA double helix structure, resulting in fewer unwanted outcomes, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation notes. Base editing, developed in 2016, corrects single-letter DNA "misspellings" that cause approximately 30% of genetic diseases. Prime editing, introduced in 2019, can replace entire stretches of defective DNA.

These technologies have already been used in at least 15 clinical trials, according to Harvard's chemistry department. One notable success story includes 16-year-old Alyssa Tapley, who made a surprise appearance at the award ceremony. At age 13, Tapley was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia that was deemed incurable after conventional treatments failed. Doctors used Liu's base editing technology to engineer cells that successfully fought her cancer, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute reports.

Liu, who now holds positions at Harvard University and the Broad Institute, plans to donate his prize money to fund research in other laboratories struggling with federal funding cuts, according to The Boston Globe.

The Breakthrough Prize, often called the "Oscars of Science," was founded in 2013 by tech industry leaders including Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg, and Anne Wojcicki, the Broad Institute notes.