Nobel Prize winners Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman harnessed messenger RNA, an advance that led to the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.
Biochemist Katalin Karikó, left, and Dr. Drew Weissman, a physician-scientist, after receiving the Japan Prize in April. The pair won the Nobel Prize for making mRNA vaccines possible., American scientists whose long collaboration has revolutionized the making of vaccines and raised the prospect of new treatments for a range of afflictions, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine Monday for their work on messenger RNA.
“Ten years ago, she told me that she was terminated from her current position and had to move to Germany for another position without her family and so forth,” Perlmann said. “So it’s been a dramatic change in her circumstances.” The techniques pioneered by Karikó and Weissman have allowed scientists to nimbly customize the proteins targeted by vaccines, a key for thwarting shape-shifting viruses like the coronavirus and HIV.
Karikó was first introduced to ribonucleic acid, or RNA, in 1978 and said she’s been “passionate about this fragile molecule ever since.” She was exploring DNA’s use of messenger RNA to deliver specific work orders to cells when she met Weissman over a photocopy machine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997.. He had been intrigued by the possibility that mRNA could induce cells to produce proteins that the body was missing or that it needed to heal itself.
Weissman knew that messenger RNA had an incidental effect on dendritic cells: Their interaction touched off an immune response that ignited dangerous inflammation across the body. By 2004, the two had produced a paper that detailed their success at reengineering mRNA for use in mammals. In anwith the journal Cell, the two recalled that their first paper together was rejected by the three premier science journals — Cell, Science and Nature. One reviewer dismissed the work as a mere “incremental improvement” over existing research in the area.“We sat and stared at the phone, and nothing happened,” Weissman said.
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