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Founded in 2013, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing and celebrating breakthrough research. This year, the foundation gave away a whopping US$36million in prize money for research into the life sciences, physics and mathematics. We’re pleased to say that one of the winners of the 2015 Life Science Prize was Jennifer Doudna, one of F1000’s Structural Biology Section Heads.

Doudna, from University of California, Berkeley, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, shares her prize with research colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier. They were recognised for their discovery in 2012 of CRISPR technology (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), a genome editing technique that harnesses an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity to create a powerful technology for the life sciences. Since their ground-breaking research on genome editing, the CRISPR/Cas9 system is now widely used by research groups worldwide for disease diagnosis, treatment, medical therapeutics and more.

Doudna won a 2014 Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences last year, an award designed to honour outstanding achievement by a promising scientist aged 52 or younger.

Many congratulations to Doudna and Charpentier on their remarkable achievement!