Craig Martin, professor of chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been chosen as this year’s winner of the 2025 Mahoney Life Sciences Prize for his research into synthesizing vaccine quality RNA using a technique that improves its quality and yield while drastically lowering the cost. The Mahoney Prize comes with a $25,000 cash award.
Martin’s prize-winning paper, A New Approach to RNA Synthesis: Immobilization of Stably and Functionally Co-tethered Promoter DNA and T7 RNA Polymerase, for which he was the senior author alongside Kithmie Malagoda Pathiranage and Ruptanu Banerjee, both members of his lab, is the most recent publication in his career-spanning effort to better understand how the information messenger molecule RNA is made from DNA within each cell that is responsible for building our bodies. The paper describes a new technique, building on his lab’s previous work, that streamlines the process for the synthesis and manufacture of high-quality RNA, of any length, at greatly reduced costs. Such high-quality RNA is the key ingredient of a whole host of cutting-edge therapeutics, of which the COVID vaccine is the most famous example.
Martin and his colleague, chemical engineer Sarah Perry, an expert on microfluidics, recently teamed up to form a company, Waterfall Scientific, that can deliver kilograms of pure RNA for medical use.