STOCKHOLM — Two scientists received the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the advent of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 and which may be used to increase different pictures in the long run.
Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman had been cited for contributing “to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” in accordance to the panel that awarded the prize in Stockholm.
The panel mentioned the pair’s “groundbreaking findings … fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.”
Traditionally, making vaccines required growing viruses or pieces of viruses and then purifying them before next steps in brewing shots. The the messenger RNA approach starts with a snippet of genetic code that carries instructions for making proteins. Pick the right virus protein to target, and the body turns into a mini vaccine factory.
But simply injecting lab-grown mRNA into the body triggered a reaction that usually destroyed it. Karikó, a professor at Szeged University in Hungary and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Weissman, of the University of Pennsylvania, figured out a tiny modification to the building blocks of RNA that made it stealthy enough to slip past those immune defenses.
Karikó, 68, is the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize in medicine. She was a senior vice president at BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to make one of the COVID-19 vaccines. She and Weissman, 64, who is a professor and director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovations, met by chance in the 1990s while photocopying research papers, according to Penn Today, the university’s news website.
Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia, described the mRNA vaccines as a “game changer” in serving to to close down the coronavirus pandemic, crediting the pictures with saving thousands and thousands of lives.
“If it hadn’t been for the mRNA technology, COVID would have been much worse,” he said. “Vaccines generally were the turning point in slowing down COVID and the mRNA vaccines were just so much better than all the others,” he said, noting that the main vaccine used in the U.K., made by AstraZeneca, is barely in use anymore.
“We would likely only now be coming out of the depths of COVID without the mRNA vaccines,” Hunter said.
Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an infectious diseases expert at Exeter University, said that a major advantage of mRNA technology was that vaccines could be made in extremely large quantities since their main components are made in laboratories.
Pankhania predicted that the technology used in the vaccines could be used to refine vaccines for other diseases like Ebola, malaria and dengue, and might also be used to create shots that immunize people against certain types of cancer or auto-immune diseases like lupus.
“It’s possible that we could vaccinate people against abnormal cancer proteins and have the immune system attack it after being given a targeted mRNA shot,” he explained. “It’s a much more targeted technology than has been previously available and could revolutionize how we handle not only outbreaks, but non-communicable diseases.”
Nobel Committee member Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam said the prize could go some way to addressing concerns among skeptics about the speed with which COVID-19 vaccines were developed.
She mentioned the award highlights “the decades of basic research that’s behind this kind of work.”
Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines program at the Washington advocacy group Public Citizen, welcomed the recognition of mRNA vaccines, but said the award should also be deeply embarrassing for Western countries.
“This is a technology that should have been available to all of humanity but it was almost exclusively available only in the richest countries in the world,” he mentioned, including that a lot of the investment that led to the improvement of mRNA era got here from public budget in the U.S.
While mRNA vaccines had been extensively used in North America and throughout Europe to close down COVID-19, just a small selection of the pictures had been made to be had to poorer international locations months after vaccination began in wealthy international locations.
“The future is just so incredible,” Weissman mentioned. “We’ve been thinking for years about everything that we could do with RNA, and now it’s here.”
Karikó mentioned her husband used to be the primary to select up the early morning name, handing it to her to pay attention the news. “I couldn’t believe it,” she mentioned. “I was very much surprised. But I am very happy.”
Before COVID-19, mRNA vaccines had been already being examined for different sicknesses like Zika, influenza and rabies — however the pandemic introduced extra consideration to this method, Karikó mentioned.
“There was already clinical trials before COVID, but people were not aware,” she mentioned.
Karikó’s circle of relatives are not any strangers to top honors. Her daughter, Susan Francia, is a double Olympic gold medalist in rowing, competing for the United States.
The prize carries a money award of eleven million Swedish kronor ($1 million) — from a bequest left by means of the prize’s author, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to obtain their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s loss of life.
Nobel bulletins proceed with the physics prize on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will probably be introduced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 9.
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This tale has been up to date to right kind that Karikó is a professor at Szeged University, now not Sagan’s University.
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Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands. Associated Press writers Maria Cheng in London, Maddie Burakoff in New York and Lauran Neergaard in Washington contributed to this document.
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