This year\u2019s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karik\u00f3 and Drew Weissman for their work on mRNA vaccines, which were crucial in curtailing the spread of Covid-19. <\/p>\n
The Nobel Prize committee announced the prestigious honor, seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement, in Sweden on Monday. <\/p>\n
It praised the scientists\u2019 \u201cgroundbreaking findings,\u201d which the committee said \u201cfundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.\u201d <\/p>\n
Karik\u00f3 and Weissman published their results in a 2005 paper that received little attention at the time, it said, but later laid the foundation for critically important developments that served humanity during the Covid pandemic. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,\u201d the committee added in a statement. <\/p>\n
Rickard Sandberg, a member of the Nobel Prize in medicine committee, said \u201cmRNA 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.\u201d <\/p>\n
Karik\u00f3, a Hungarian-American biochemist, and Weissman, an American physician, are both professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work became the foundation for Pfizer and its German-based partner BioNTech, as well as Moderna, to use a new approach to produce vaccines that use messenger RNA or mRNA. <\/p>\n
Messenger RNA is a single strand of the genetic code that cells can \u201cread\u201d and use to make a protein. In the case of this vaccine, the mRNA instructs cells in the body to make the particular piece of the virus\u2019s spike protein. Then the immune system sees it, recognizes it as foreign and is prepared to attack when actual infection occurs. <\/p>\n
This design was chosen for a pandemic vaccine because it\u2019s one that lends itself to quick turnaround. All that is needed is the genetic sequence of the virus causing the pandemic. Vaccine makers don\u2019t even need the virus itself \u2013 just the sequence. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe impressive flexibility and speed with which mRNA vaccines can be developed pave the way for using the new platform also for vaccines against other infectious diseases,\u201d the Nobel committee said, adding that the technology \u201cmay also be used to deliver therapeutic proteins and treat some cancer types.\u201d <\/p>\n
J. Larry Jameson, executive vice president of UPenn\u2019s School of Medicine, praised the scientists\u2019 work which \u201cchanged the world.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cDuring the biggest public health crisis of our lifetimes, vaccine developers relied upon the discoveries by Dr. Weissman and Dr. Karik\u00f3, which saved innumerable lives and paved a path out of the pandemic,\u201d Jameson said in a statement. \u201cMore than 15 years after their visionary laboratory partnership, Kati and Drew have made an everlasting imprint on medicine.\u201d <\/p>\n
The Nobel Prize announcements began in Sweden Monday and will continue throughout this week and into next, with awards in physics, chemistry, literature and economics set to be announced in the coming days. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced in Norway on Friday. <\/p>\n
Karik\u00f3, 68, began her career in her native Hungary in the 1970s, when mRNA research was new. She, her husband and young daughter left for the United States after she received an invitation from Temple University in Philadelphia. They sold their car, Karik\u00f3 told The Guardian, and stuffed the money \u2013 an equivalent of about $1,200 \u2013 in their daughter\u2019s teddy bear for safekeeping. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe had just moved into our new apartment, our daughter was 2 years old, everything was so good, we were happy,\u201d Karik\u00f3 told the Hungarian news site G7 of her family\u2019s departure. \u201cBut we had to go.\u201d <\/p>\n
She continued her research at Temple, before joining the UPenn\u2019s School of Medicine. But by then, the initial excitement surrounding mRNA research had started to fizz out. Hope turned to skepticism: Karik\u00f3\u2019s idea that it could be used to fight disease was deemed too radical \u2013 and too financially risky to fund. <\/p>\n
She applied to grant after grant, but a string of rejections meant that in 1995, she was demoted from her position at UPenn. She was also diagnosed with cancer at the same time. <\/p>\n
But she stuck at it. \u201cTogether 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, Karik\u00f3 said. <\/p>\n
They did not even need a sample of the virus itself. \u201cWhen the Chinese released the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we started the process of making RNA the next day. A couple weeks later, we were injecting animals with the vaccine,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
At the time Karik\u00f3 said she was not at all surprised by the successful results of the trials conducted by Pfizer and Moderna. \u201cI expected that it would work, because we already had enough experiments,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n\n
This year\u2019s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karik\u00f3 and Drew Weissman for their work on mRNA vaccines, which were crucial in curtailing the spread of Covid-19. The Nobel Prize committee announced the prestigious honor, seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement, in Sweden on Monday. It praised the scientists\u2019 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9518,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9517","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}