STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – The 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine was jointly awarded on Monday to the Hungarian Katalin Karikó and the American Drew Weissman to reward their discoveries which enabled the development of so-called messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines against COVID -19.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, is the first of the prizes awarded each year in the name of the Nobel Foundation.
“The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries regarding nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19,” the foundation said.
Katalin Karikó served until 2022 as vice president at BioNTech, which developed an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 with Pfizer. She has since acted as a consultant to the company.
She is also a professor at the University of Szeged in Hungary and an assistant professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Drew Weissman, another recognized specialist in mRNA technology, is a professor of vaccine research at the Perelman School of Medicine.
Katalin Karikó managed to find a way to prevent the immune system from triggering an inflammatory reaction against laboratory-made mRNA, which was previously considered a major obstacle to any therapeutic use of this technology.
With Drew Weissman, she showed in 2005 that adjustments to nucleosides, the molecular letters that write mRNA’s genetic code, could keep mRNA under the immune system’s radar.
“This year’s Nobel Prize therefore recognizes their basic science discovery that fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with the immune system and had a major impact on society during the recent pandemic,” Rickard said Sandberg, member of the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Swede Svante Pääbo for his work on the genomes of extinct hominin lineages and the evolution of the human species, which allowed the emergence of a new discipline, paleogenetics.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is the first of the prizes awarded each year in the name of the Nobel Foundation.
The announcements of the Nobel Prizes in physics (Tuesday), chemistry (Wednesday), literature (Thursday), peace (Friday) and economics (next Monday) will follow in the coming days.
(Reporting by Niklas Pollard, Johan Ahlander in Stockholm, and Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt; with contributions from Terje Solsvik in Oslo; Blandine Hénault for the French version, editing by Kate Entringer)
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