The development of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, which have been key in mitigating the impact of the Covid pandemic, has been recognized with this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine. As announced by the Nobel Foundation, the award has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, from the University of Pennsylvania (USA).
They have been awarded "for their discoveries on nucleoside base modifications that have enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19", according to the verdict of the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
The jury highlights that "with their pioneering findings, (...) the laureates contributed to the development of vaccines at an unprecedented pace during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times." Furthermore, he adds, Karikó and Weissman's research "has fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system."
The messenger RNA technology developed thanks to the work of Weissman and Karikó is the basis of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines - the first to be approved against covid, just eleven months after the discovery of the SARS-CoV-2 virus - and Moderna .
Looking to the future, messenger RNA "opens the way (...) also for vaccines against other infectious diseases," highlights the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in the statement announcing the award. "This technology could also be used to deliver therapeutic proteins and treat some types of cancer."
These advances would not have been possible if it were not for the tenacity of Karikó, a Hungarian biochemist who arrived in the US around 1990 as a postdoctoral researcher with the purpose of developing messenger RNA technologies. Since messenger RNA is the natural molecule from which cells create proteins, Karikó thought that this molecule could be used for some cells to make necessary proteins. This is precisely the idea on which the first Covid vaccines were based, in which mRNA causes human cells to make a coronavirus protein, so that the immune system learns to recognize this protein and attack the virus.
However, during his first five years in the US, Karikó found his research projects being rejected because evaluators didn't think the idea would work. By not getting funding and having no results, she did not obtain a position as a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania as she intended, but rather she was demoted.
"I thought 'maybe I'm not good enough, smart enough,'" she confessed in 2020 on Stat News. But instead of giving up, she decided to persist.
The problem he had to solve was how to prevent the messenger RNA from being destroyed by the immune system in order to produce proteins in the cells. This was the reason why the evaluators thought that the idea would not work and allocated the available funding to other projects.
The solution was found by collaborating with immunologist Drew Weissman, also from the University of Pennsylvania. In seminal research published in Immunity in 2005, Weissman and Karikó discovered how to modify messenger RNA in a way that would not alert the immune system.
"It was a paradigm shift in our understanding of how cells recognize and respond to different forms of mRNA," highlights the Karolinska Institute Nobel Assembly. "Karikó and Weissman immediately understood that their discovery had profound importance for using mRNA as a therapy."
It was also understood by a few other researchers such as Ugur Sahin and Özlem Tureci, who founded the company BioNTech in Germany with the initial goal of applying messenger RNA to cancer immunotherapy; or how Derrick Rossi, from Stanford University (USA), who was at the origin of the company Moderna, also with cancer immunotherapy as its first objective.
In the following years, as Karikó and Weissman continued to research messenger RNA technology, interest in applying it to the development of vaccines increased. Among those that will be investigated, MERS stands out, an infection caused by a coronavirus closely related to Covid.
On the other hand, BioNTech explored the potential of messenger RNA for flu vaccines, which led Sahin and Tureci's company to begin collaborating with Pfizer before the pandemic. For another
When the pandemic broke out, the field of messenger RNA research, which would not have developed if it had not been for Karikó's initial efforts, was already ripe for application to the development of vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Following tradition, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was announced on the first Monday in October and is the first to be made public. They will follow Physics tomorrow; Chemistry on Wednesday; Literature on Thursday; that of Peace on Friday; and the Economy list will close next Monday.
The winners will receive the award in Stockholm on December 10 in Stockholm, coinciding with the date of Alfred Nobel's death.
Each prize is awarded to a maximum of three people, who share the 11 million Swedish crowns (about 950,000 euros) with which the award is endowed in each category.
Only twelve of the 227 people who have received the Nobel Prize in Medicine since the first edition in 1901 are women. Karikó is the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine since 2015, when she received it from the Chinese Tu Youyou for the development of treatments against malaria.
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