$3M Breakthrough Prize Goes To UCSF Professor

SANTA CLARA VALLEY, CA — A University of California at San Francisco biochemist won a Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences and was awarded $3 million at Sunday night's ceremony at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. Breakthrough Prizes are awarded in mathematics, physics and the life sciences and were founded by Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, and his wife Anne Wojcicki, CEO of 23andMe, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook and his wife Dr. Priscilla Chan. The prizes aim to promote the advancement of science.

Peter Walter, 62, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF, won the prize for his research on a biological mechanism that normally protects cells but can cause diseases if it doesn't function properly. The research may help doctors one day kill cancer cells, according to Kyoto University biophysics professor Kazutoshi Mori, who shared the discovery with Walter and also won a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and $3 million.

Walter and the other laureates were slated to speak Monday at the Breakthrough Prize Symposium at Stanford University. The symposium can be seen live on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/BreakthroughPrize.

By Bay City News Service

Photo courtesy University of California at San Francisco