Nobel prize goes to mRNA Covid vaccine researchers

Researchers Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman won the Nobel Medicine Prize yesterday for work on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that paved the way for groundbreaking coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccines.
The pair, who had been tipped as favourites, “contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times”, the jury said.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared Covid-19 a pandemic in March 2020 and the first mRNA vaccines were approved for use against the illness in December that year.
Billions of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna doses have been injected around the world since then.
Together with other Covid vaccines, they “have saved millions of lives and prevented severe disease in many more”, the jury said.
Kariko, 68, and Weissman, 64, longstanding colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in the United States, have already won a slew of awards for their research.
In recognising the duo this year, the Nobel committee broke with its usual practice of honouring decades-old discoveries, aimed at ensuring it has stood the test of time.
While the prizewinning research dates back to 2005, the first vaccines to use the mRNA technology came out just three years ago.
Unlike traditional vaccines which use weakened virus or a key piece of the virus’ protein, mRNA vaccines provide the genetic molecules that tell cells what proteins to make, which simulates an infection and trains the immune system for when it encounters the real virus.
The idea was first demonstrated in 1990 but it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that Weissman, of the US, and Hungarian-born Kariko developed a technique to control a dangerous inflammatory response seen in animals exposed to these molecules, opening the way to develop safe human vaccines.
Kariko and Weissman will receive their Nobel diploma, gold medal and $1mn cheque in Stockholm on December 10.
“We are not working for any kind of reward,” Kariko, who struggled for years to find grants for her research, said in remarks alongside Weissman at UPenn’s Philadelphia campus, a few hours after she was awoken by the call from Stockholm. “The importance was to have a product which is helpful.”