The timing couldn’t have been worse. In March, just as Thailand’s coronavirus outbreak began to ramp up, three hospitals in Bangkok announced that they had suspended testing for the virus because they had run out of reagents. Thai researchers rushed to help the country’s clinical laboratories meet the demand. Looking for affordable and easy-to-use tests, systems biologist Chayasith (Tao) Uttamapinant at the Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science and Technology in Rayong reached out to an old acquaintance: CRISPR co-discoverer Feng Zhang, who had been developing an assay for the coronavirus inspired by the gene-editing technology.
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April 2, 2020
Celebrating the 2020 Vilcek Foundation Prizewinners
In lieu of the annual Vilcek Foundation awards gala, we developed a microsite to share the achievements of this year’s prizewinners.
Creative Promise Prizewinner Amit Choudhary is used to crossing borders and breaking boundaries.
March 21, 2018
Feng Zhang: From ESL to Revolution
Credited with the development of transformative technologies such as CRISPR, Feng Zhang delights in helping others realize their potential. “Every person has their own creativity and their own way of thinking about problems,” Feng says. “That’s part of the joy too, seeing how you can help people realize an even bigger impact.”
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2018
Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise
Feng Zhang
Feng Zhang receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science for using light to manipulate the activities of brain cells in living animals and for enabling rapid alterations to the genomes of living organisms.
2020
Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise
Kivanç Birsoy
Kıvanç Birsoy receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science for developing cutting-edge tools to unravel the altered metabolism of cancer cells and uncovering molecular targets for treatment.
2019
Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise
Amit Choudhary
Amit Choudhary receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science for the identification of a fundamental force integral to the structures of biomolecules like proteins and DNA, and for improvements upon the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9.
