David R. Liu

David R. Liu is the Richard Merkin Professor, Director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, and Vice-Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT; Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences & Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University; and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

His major research interests include the engineering, evolution, and in vivo delivery of genome editing agents to study and treat genetic diseases; the evolution of novel therapeutic proteins using phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE); and the discovery of bioactive synthetic molecules using DNA-templated organic synthesis and DNA-encoded libraries. Base editing—the first general method to perform precision gene editing without double-stranded breaks and a Science 2017 Breakthrough of the Year finalist—as well as prime editing, PACE, and DNA-templated synthesis are examples of technologies pioneered in his laboratory. These technologies are used by thousands of labs around the world. The first base editing clinical trial is underway, with multiple additional base editing clinical trials cleared by FDA and other agencies to begin in 2022.

Liu has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the 2022 King Faisal Prize Laureate in Medicine. He has earned several distinctions for teaching at Harvard, including the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, the Roslyn Abramson Award, and a Harvard College Professorship.

Liu has published >225 papers and is the inventor on >90 issued U.S. patents. His research accomplishments have earned distinctions including the Ronald Breslow Award for Biomimetic Chemistry, the American Chemical Society David Perlman Award, ACS Chemical Biology Award, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, the Arthur Cope Young Scholar Award, the NIH Marshall Nirenberg Lecturer, and awards from the Sloan Foundation, Beckman Foundation, NSF CAREER Program, and Searle Scholars Program. In 2016 and 2020 he was named one of the Top 20 Translational Researchers in the world by Nature Biotechnology, and was named one of Nature’s 10 researchers in world in 2017. He is the founder or co-founder of several biotechnology and therapeutics companies, including Beam Therapeutics, Prime Medicine, Editas Medicine, Pairwise Plants, Exo Therapeutics, Chroma Medicine, Resonance Medicine, and Nvelop Therapeutics.