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This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their work on mRNA vaccines, a tool to slow the spread of Covid-19.
The Nobel Prize committee on Monday announced the prestigious award, the pinnacle of clinical achievement in Sweden.
He praised the scientists’ “groundbreaking discoveries,” which the committee said “fundamentally replaced the way mRNA interacts with our immune system. “
Karikó and Weissman published their findings in a 2005 paper that received little attention at the time, he says, but which later laid the groundwork for vitally important breakthroughs that served humanity during the coronavirus pandemic.
“The winners contributed to the unprecedented speed of vaccine progression, one of the greatest threats to human fitness in fashionable times,” the committee added in a statement.
Rickard Sandberg, a member of the Nobel Prize in Medicine committee, said: “mRNA vaccines, as well as other Covid-19 vaccines, have been administered more than thirteen billion times. Together, they have saved millions of lives, avoided a serious Covid-19 bureaucracy. 19, reduced the global burden of disease and allowed societies to open up again.
Karikó, a Hungarian-American biochemist, and Weissman, an American physician, are professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work has allowed Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, as well as Moderna, to use a new technique to produce messenger RNA from vaccines. or mRNA.
This revolutionary generation opened a new bankruptcy in medicine. It has the prospect of being used to expand vaccines against other diseases such as malaria, RSV and HIV. It also proposes a novelty for infectious diseases such as cancer, with the perspective of personalized vaccines. .
Researchers compare DNA to a large recipe book with all the instructions of life. Messenger RNA is a single transient strand of genetic code that cells can “read” and use to produce a protein, much like a handwritten copy of a recipe in the cookbook analogy.
In the case of mRNA vaccines, the transient genetic code is used to signal cells to produce what looks like a virus fragment, so that the framework produces antibodies and cells with a special immune formula in response. Unlike other vaccines, a live or attenuated virus is injected or required at any time.
All that is needed is the genetic sequence. Vaccine brands don’t even want the virus itself, just the sequence.
“The impressive flexibility and speed with which mRNA vaccines can be developed prepares the use of the new platform also for vaccines against other infectious diseases,” the Nobel committee said, adding that the generation “could also be used to deliver healing proteins. “and treat infectious diseases. ” certain types of cancer.
J. Larry Jameson, vice president of UPenn’s School of Medicine, praised the scientists’ paintings that he said “changed the world. “
“During the greatest public health crisis of our lifetimes, vaccine developers built on the discoveries of Dr. Weissman and Dr. Karikó, which saved countless lives and paved the way out of the pandemic,” Jameson said in a statement. 15 years after their visionary collaboration in the lab, Kati and Drew have left a permanent mark on medicine. “
Announcements of the Nobel Prizes began Monday in Sweden and will continue this week and next, with prizes in physics, chemistry, literature and economics expected to be announced in the coming days. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in Norway on Friday.
Karikó, 68, began his career in his local Hungary in the 1970s, when new mRNAs were being studied. She, her husband and their young daughter left for the United States after receiving an invitation from Temple University in Philadelphia. They sold his car, Karikó told the Guardian, and put the cash (the equivalent of about $1,200) in his daughter’s teddy bear to keep him safe.
“We had just moved into our new apartment, our daughter was 2 years old, everything was going very well, we were happy,” Karikó told Hungarian news site G7 about her family’s departure. “But we had to go. “
He continued his studies at Temple, before joining UPenn School of Medicine in 19xx. But by then, the initial enthusiasm for mRNA studies had begun to fade. Hope turned to skepticism: Kariko’s concept that it could simply be used to combat the disease deemed too radical and too financially risky to fund it.
She implemented grant after grant, but a series of rejections meant that in 1995 she was demoted from her position at UPenn. At the same time, he was also diagnosed with cancer.
“It was complicated because other people didn’t know that messenger RNA could just be a therapy,” Karikó told CNN, during an interview during the pandemic in December 2020.
But she stood her ground. ” Together with my colleague Drew Weissman from the University of Pennsylvania, we developed this approach in which we change a component of RNA, making it less immunogenic. It is conceivable to use it for other types of therapies, Karikó explained.
Karikó and Weissman met in the late 1990s while photocopying research papers. In 2005, they published their key discovery: mRNA can be effectively modified and delivered to the body to activate the body’s protective immune system.
Weissman told CNN that his generation is much more effective than classic vaccine production strategies.
“When the Chinese published the SARS-CoV-2 virus series, we started the RNA production procedure the next day. A few weeks later, we injected the vaccine into the animals,” he said.
Karikó said then that he was not at all surprised by the positive effects of the Pfizer and Moderna trials. “I was hoping it would work, because we already had enough experience,” he said.
She celebrated the successful effects of the test with a bag of Goobers, chocolate-covered peanuts, her favorite candy. “I’m an exuberant person,” Karikó told CNN at the time.
CNN’s Maggie Fox, Leah Asmelash and AJ Willingham contributed to this report.
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