The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19.”
Karikó and Weissman’s works were pivotal to developing mRNA-based Covid vaccines, which account for billion of doses administered worldwide.
“Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” said the Nobel Assembly in its announcement.
Dr. Karikó is a Hungarian-American biochemist whose works on RNA-mediated immune mechanisms became the mainstay of mRNA vaccine development. She’s an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania and senior vice president at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals.
Her co-winner, Dr. Drew Weissman, is a 64-year-old American physician and a professor of vaccine research at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Weissman joined UPenn in 1997 to continue his work on the nexus between RNA and the innate immune system.
Dr. Karikó and Dr. Weissman jointly won the 2021 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for their work.
The two researchers met at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998, and their works revolutionized vaccine technology. The magic of their work was the messenger RNA.
For years, vaccine researchers and manufacturers developed vaccines that carried parts of viruses or weakened ones to the body to prepare the immune system to nullify future invasions from the viruses, but Karikó and Weissman discovered that messenger RNA, also called mRNA, could offer a subtler and less risky means to achieve this sensitization.
The mRNA carries instructions for making viral proteins responsible for the structure and functioning of viruses.
Instead of viruses or viral parts, an mRNA allows vaccine developers to introduce the instructions for viral infection into the host.
This concept allows the host’s cells to produce their viral proteins and mount a better-tailored response than the traditional vaccine.
However, mRNA molecules are so delicate that they are quickly destroyed by the host’s immune cells when introduced to the body.
Dr. Karikó and Dr. Weissman’s research resolved this challenge by discovering ways to tweak the mRNA and allow it to pass on the instructions for viral protein production without triggering an immune response. This research was published in 2005 by Immunity.
Their research gained little traction or acceptance when published- The New York Times quoted Dr. Weissman as saying that prestigious journals like Nature and Science rejected it.
Their fortunes changed for good when two biotech giants, Moderna and BioNTech, took interest in the work and acquired licenses for its use in developing vaccines. The Covid-19 outbreak spiked further interest in their work and accelerated its adoption to mainstream vaccine development.
The 2023 Prize marks a return to joint winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine after David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian won the Prize in 2021 for their works on “receptors for temperature and touch.”
The 2022 Prize went to Svante Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.”
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is the first Prize to be announced for 2023.
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