Katalin Kariko of Hungary and Drew Weissman of the US won the Nobel Medicine Prize for work on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that paved the way for COVID-19 vaccines.
The pair got the award “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19,” the jury said.
“The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” it added.
The panel said 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 the next steps. The messenger RNA (mRNA) approach starts with a snippet of genetic code-carrying 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 immune defenses.
