Thanks to their research on messenger RNA (mRNA), a duo of researchers have just been awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Medicine.
As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, mRNA vaccines arrived providentially. This innovation would not have been possible without the work of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, two scientists. The first is a Hungarian-American biochemist who was vice-president of the German laboratory BioNTech (which today works with AI) until 2022. The company collaborated with Pfizer to develop the mRNA vaccine during the pandemic.
Dr. Weissman is an American research professor specializing in vaccines at the Perelman School of Medicine in Pennsylvania. They have just been rewarded for their work, which began at the end of the 1990s, with the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Pioneering research on mRNA
The duo met in 1998 at the University of Pennsylvania. Seven years later, they published the results of their revolutionary discoveries on mRNA. A real game changer at the time. The classic route to designing a vaccine was then to use modified viruses to stimulate the body to produce an immune response.
Karikó and Weissman discovered another avant-garde technique: the integration of modified messenger RNA into cells. As explained by Inserm, “ this involves causing the fragments of infectious agents to be produced directly by the cells of the vaccinated individual. For this, it is not the virus in its attenuated form that is injected, but only the information, in the form of DNA or RNA molecules, allowing the antigens of the pathogen to be produced. “. This innovation was the keystone for the rapid development of the COVID vaccine by Pfizer-BioNTech, more than 20 years after this discovery.
Perseverance behind success
Today, the research of the two specialists is finally recognized for its true value. But the path to this discovery was not a long, quiet river for Karikó and Weissman. Originally from Szolnok, a small town in Hungary, Katalin fought hard to obtain her first mRNA research grants when she began working in the United States in the 1980s.
She met Weissman in 1998 completely by chance in front of a photocopier. It was at this moment that she convinced him of the potential of mRNA. He was then working on a vaccine against HIV. Even though mRNA had already been known since the 1960s, it was not until the appearance of SARS-CoV-2 that the whole world became aware of the importance of their research.
Rewarded late for their investigations and their collaboration, Karikó and Weissman finally saw their work duly recognized by the sacrosanct Nobel Prize. A well-deserved distinction for those who succeeded in modifying synthetic RNA in 2005.
Sources: The Verge, Radio France, Inserm
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