Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences

Nine researchers are the big winners of the 2018 Breakthrough Prize, one of the most prestigious awards given for scientific achievement, the group's foundation announced Wednesday morning.

The brainchild of several of Silicon Valley's best known business leaders — Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan, Ma Huateng, Yuri and Julia Milner and Anne Wojcicki — the prize honors outstanding work in life sciences, fundamental physics and mathematics.

This year's prizes honor a range of groundbreaking research that include the development of the gene therapy drug Spinraza that treats the deadly infant disease Spinal Muscular Atrophy; insight into how abnormal numbers of chromosomes impact cancer; the discovery of a new class of electronic materials that simultaneously conduct and resist electricity; and contributions to the Langlands program of mathematics.

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation will hand out the awards at a black tie event — known as the Oscars of science — on Nov. 4.

That event, to be held at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, will be broadcast live nationally on the National Geographic channel as well as streamed on Facebook and YouTube. The event will be hosted by actor and philanthropist Pierce Brosnan and will include a tribute to the late physicist Stephen Hawking, who died in March.

Each of seven Breakthrough Prize comes with a $3 million check, considered the most generous science award. As a comparison, the Nobel Prize is worth about $1.1 million. Two of the specific Breakthrough Prizes are given to two-person teams, while the other five go to a single person.

In addition, six New Horizons Prizes, each worth $100,000, are being awarded to seven physicists and five mathematicians for early-career achievements. In all, $22 million worth of prizes are being bestowed.