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. The award was given yesterday to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, from the University of Pennsylvania (USA). They have been awarded “for the discoveries about the modifications of the nucleoside bases that have enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against the Covid-19 virus”, according to the verdict of the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute d ‘ Stockholm.
The jury emphasizes that “the awardees contributed to the development of vaccines at an unprecedented rate during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times”. In addition, Karikó and Weissman’s research “has fundamentally changed the understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.”
The mRNA technology developed thanks to Karikó and Weissman is the basis of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Looking to the future, messenger RNA “also paves the way (…) for vaccines against other infectious diseases”, highlights the Nobel Assembly in the press release announcing the award. “This technology could also be used to administer therapeutic proteins and treat some types of cancer.”
The advances would not have been possible had it not been for the tenacity of Karikó, a Hungarian biochemist who came to the US in 1985 as a postdoctoral researcher with the purpose of developing mRNA technologies. Since mRNA is the natural molecule from which cells create proteins, Karikó thought the molecule could be used to make some cells make needed proteins. It’s the idea behind the first covid vaccines: mRNA causes human cells to make a protein from the coronavirus, so the immune system learns to recognize the protein and attack the virus.
However, at first Karikó’s projects were rejected because the evaluators did not think the idea could work. With no funding and no results, she did not get a full professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as she had hoped, but instead was demoted. 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, which is why the evaluators thought the idea would not work and allocated the funding to other projects.
He found the solution while collaborating with immunologist Drew Weissman, also from the University of Pennsylvania. Weissman and Karikó – who last year also received the Fronteras del Conocimiento award from the BBVA Foundation – discovered how to modify messenger RNA without alerting the immune system. “Karikó and Weissman immediately understood that the discovery was of profound importance for using mRNA as a therapy”, the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute highlighted yesterday.
It was also understood by other researchers, such as Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, who founded the company BioNTech in Germany with the idea of ??applying messenger RNA to cancer immunotherapy, or Derrick Rossi, from Stanford University ( USA), involved in the origin of the Moderna company.
In the following years, while Karikó and Weissman were still researching messenger RNA technology, there was increased interest in applying it to vaccine development. Among those investigated, MERS stands out, an infection caused by a coronavirus related to covid.
On the other hand, BioNTech explored the potential of messenger RNA for flu vaccines, which led Sahin and Türeci’s company to begin collaborating with Pfizer before the pandemic. When covid arrived, the field of messenger RNA research was already ripe for application to the development of vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
