April 7, 20254 min readObesity-Drug Pioneers and Large Hadron Collider Physicists win $3-Million Breakthrough PrizesAdvances recognized by sciences most lucrative awards include high-energy physics experiments and groundbreaking weight-loss treatmentsBy Zeeya Merali & Nature magazine The Breakthrough prize trophys design is inspired by imagery from science, including black holes, seashells and the structure of DNA. Breakthrough PrizeFive scientists who contributed to the development of the blockbuster weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy have picked up one of this years US$3-million Breakthrough prizes the most lucrative awards in science.Originally developed to treat diabetes, these drugs work by mimicking a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) that controls blood sugar levels and helps to curb appetite. This class of drugs truly saves lives, changes lives and brings joy back to peoples lives, says Ziyad Al-Aly, a physician-scientist at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri, who recently led a massive study analysing data from almost two million people to evaluate the effects of such medication.This life-sciences prize is shared between the four researchers who discovered and characterized GLP-1 endocrinologist Daniel Drucker at the University of Toronto, Canada; physician-researchers Joel Habener at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts and Jens Juul Holst at the University of Copenhagen; and chemist Svetlana Mojsov at The Rockefeller University in New York City along with Lotte Bjerre Knudsen of pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk in Bagsvrd, Denmark, who spearheaded the development of drugs based on these discoveries.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.In the 1990s, Drucker and his colleagues realized that GLP-1 caused animals to eat less and lose weight. Knudsen stablized the drug by adding fatty-acid chains, enabling it to bind to proteins in the blood, which prevents it from breaking down rapidly once injected. Its a tremendous honour to receive this prestigious award, says Drucker. But the most amazing gratification is when someone comes to my office and says, I lost 40 pounds [18 kg] and I feel healthy.Everyones a winnerThe award is one of six Breakthrough prizes to be awarded this year in life sciences, physics and mathematics.Unusually for a major award, one of the fundamental-physics prizes was awarded to a grand total of 13,508 physicists spanning four collaborations at CERN, Europes particle physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland. Through experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), these researchers have taken multiple precision measurements over the past decade to probe, and so far confirm, the standard model of particle physics. Were honoured the award was made to the entire collaboration because without all those people we could not have made these advances, says Patricia McBride, a spokesperson for CERNs CMS collaboration. The prize money will be used to fund international students to visit CERN, she adds.The award is well deserved, says Brian Rebel, a particle physicist at the University of WisconsinMadison. Finding the Higgs [boson] in 2012 was a once-in-lifetime event, but it was only the first step, Rebel says. Since then, LHC scientists have been pinning down the mass of the Higgs and its interactions, as well as discovering 72 new particles, investigating antimatter and probing the nature of the quarkgluon plasma that existed soon after the Big Bang. It takes a small army to create the tools to test and validate these results, says Rebel.Another Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics was awarded to one of the architects of the standard model, theoretical physicist Gerard t Hooft at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who also won a share of the 1999 Nobel prize in physics for his work on the weak nuclear force, and contributed to understanding the strong nuclear force. A beautiful synthesis emerges when ones mathematics is linked to particles actually seen in the world, says t Hooft, adding that he is honoured to win the prize.A theory of everythingThe mathematics prize went to Dennis Gaitsgory at the Max Planck Institute of Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, for numerous contributions to the development of the Langlands programme dubbed the grand unified theory of mathematics because it brings together the disciplines of number theory, geometry and function fields.And two other prizes in the life sciences were awarded one shared between neuroscientist Stephen Hauser at the University of California, San Francisco, and epidemiologist Alberto Ascherio at Harvard University, for research on the drivers of multiple sclerosis (MS), a disease caused by damage to myelin, the material that surrounds and insulates nerve fibres.In the 1990s, Hauser and colleagues demonstrated that antibodies produced by the immune systems B cells were likely to be behind the damage4. This initially invited scepticism because it had been assumed that T cells were the culprits, and Hauser recalls being devastated at being refused funding because his ideas were deemed biologically implausible. The Breakthrough Prize is recognition of the importance of stick-to-it-ness, says Hauser. Independently, in 2022, Ascherio and his colleagues definitively established that infection with the EpsteinBarr virus drastically heightens a persons risk of developing MS.The final life-sciences prize went to David Liu, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for developing technologies that use CRISPR gene-editing to rewrite segments of DNA. His techniques are being employed in clinical trials for the treatment of T-cell leukaemia, sickle-cell disease, -thalassemia and high cholesterol.The Breakthrough prizes were founded in 2012 and are sponsored by Yuri Milner, a RussianIsraeli billionaire, and other Internet entrepreneurs, including Metas chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on April 5, 2025.