Joseph DeSimone, the founder of Liquidia Technologies, has received the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award, the company said.
The awards are "designed to support individual scientists of exceptional creativity who propose pioneering, and possibly transforming, approaches to major challenges in biomedical and behavioral research," the NIH said.
Liquidia said the award, which is worth $500,000 a year for five years, will be used to support the development of its Particle Replication In Non-wetting Templates, or PRINT, technology, which is used to create nanocarriers for therapeutic delivery.
The University of California, Berkeley, said that researcher Lin He has received one of this year's "genius" awards from the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation.
She received the award for her work linking microRNAs and cancer.
The award provides $500,000 in “no strings attached” support over the next five years, according to the foundation.