Bennett, Maguire, High Win $3M Prize for Luxturna
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- Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire share the $3m (£2.2m) Breakthrough Prize for life sciences with Katherine High for the 25-year Luxturna project, which produced the first approved gene therapy for blindness, approved in the US in 2017 for Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA).
- Bennett and Maguire, a married couple who met dissecting a brain at Harvard Medical School, later developed the therapy at the University of Pennsylvania; the gene therapy delivers a working copy of the faulty RPE65 gene into retinal cells and restored vision in clinical trial patients, one of whom described seeing their child's face for the first time.
- The couple adopted Venus and Mercury, two dogs they had treated during the animal-testing phase of the research.
- Bennett used her acceptance remarks to warn that the US administration's attacks on science could 'cause damage for generations to come,' citing politicized agendas, undermined research agencies, and dismissed experts, and said she feared a resulting brain drain.
- A second life sciences prize went to Swee Lay Thein and Stuart Orkin for their work on Casgevy, a gene-editing therapy for sickle cell disease and beta thalassaemia that works by disabling the BCL11A gene to force production of healthy foetal haemoglobin.
- Orkin echoed Bennett's political criticism, calling the current US environment an attack on academic institutions and the disassembly of 'scientific infrastructure that was created over many years,' while noting Casgevy is 'the first big step' and that more user-friendly therapies are still needed.
- The Breakthrough Prize ceremony, described by its Silicon Valley founders as the Oscars of science, was held Saturday night in Los Angeles; additional honors recognized work on nonlinear evolution equations (mathematics), the strong nuclear force (physics), and a multi-decade effort to measure muons.
Why it matters: The $3m prize validates a 25-year, $3m-payoff arc from basic research to approved therapy, with Luxturna now treating a previously untreatable form of congenital blindness. What gives the ceremony a sharper edge: two of the laureates independently used the 'Oscars of science' stage to publicly warn that current US science policy is dismantling the very infrastructure that produced these breakthroughs, raising the prospect of a talent drain that Bennett said the country would 'struggle to recover from.'
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