The Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to Hungarian-American biochemist, Katalin Karikó and American physician, Drew Weissman for developing the mRNA vaccines, which were instrumental in curtailing the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
The Nobel Prize committee announced the award in Sweden on Monday. According to the committee, “Karikó and Weissman published their results in a 2005 paper that received little attention at the time.”
“The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” the committee added.
Subsequently, their “groundbreaking findings” became the foundation for Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna, to explore new approaches to produce vaccines that use messenger RNA or mRNA.
In an interview in December 2020, Karikó told CNN that, “It was difficult because people did not believe that messenger RNA [could] be a therapy.”
“Together with my colleague, Drew Weissman, at the University of Pennsylvania, we developed this method where we changed one component in the RNA which made it less immunogenic. It is possible to use it for different kinds of therapies, she said.
Their revolutionary technology, which Weissman described as much more efficient than traditional methods of vaccine production, has set a new branch of medicine to be explored. Now, the messenger RNA or mRNA has the potential to be used to develop vaccines against diseases like malaria, RSV, and HIV. CNN reports that It also “offers a new approach to infectious diseases like cancer, with the prospect of personalized vaccines.”
According to Rickard Sandberg, a member of the Nobel Prize in Medicine committee, “mRNA vaccines together with other COVID-19 vaccines have been administered over 13 billion times. Together they have saved millions of lives, prevented severe COVID-19, reduced the overall disease burden, and enabled societies to open up again.”
