Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman (University of Pennsylvania)
The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman – both on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. Katalin Karikó is a Hungarian-American biochemist and Adjunct Professor of Neurosurgery who specializes in RNA-mediated mechanisms. Drew Weissman is the Director of Vaccine Research, Infectious Diseases Division and the Director, Institute for RNA Innovation, University of Pennsylvania.
“Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman are brilliant researchers who represent the epitome of scientific inspiration and determination. Day after day, Dr. Weissman, Dr. Karikó and their teams worked tirelessly to unlock the power of mRNA as a therapeutic platform, not knowing the way in which their work could serve to meet a big challenge the world would one day face,” Penn President Liz Magill told the University’s publication Penn Today.
The Nobel Prize committee explained that it presented the honor to the duo for their discoveries which it said were “critical” for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020.
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The reason why it was so hard to develop a Covid vaccine is because, like AIDS and other incurable illnesses, it is a retrovirus. This means that the virus does not proliferate by simply dividing itself over and over again. Virus that does so are easily detectable by the body’s immune system and are seen as foreign forms invading the body.
But a retrovirus uses the host body’s own cells to replicate. Specifically, it adopts mRNA from the victim and, as a result, the body’s immune system has a harder time differentiating it from regular types of virus or bacterial infections.
And in the case of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman’s work, the two did not merely find a way to vaccinate people for Covid, they also found a new way to fight against all forms of retrovirus which hopefully could lead to curing other diseases in the future.
And so, the Nobel committee described their work on the Covid 19 virus as “groundbreaking” saying that it has “fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.” The newly minted Nobel laureates contributed to the “unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times” explained the committee.
mRNA stands for messenger ribonucleic acid. It is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that carries the instructions for making proteins from DNA to the ribosome, which is the protein-making machinery of the cell.
mRNA vaccines are a new type of vaccine that uses mRNA to deliver instructions to the body’s cells on how to make a protein that is unique to a specific pathogen. When the body is exposed to the real pathogen, the immune system is able to recognize and fight it off.
mRNA vaccines have been shown to be very effective against a variety of diseases, including COVID-19. They are also relatively safe and have a good side effect profile.
Rickard Sandberg, a member of the Nobel Prize in medicine committee, said “mRNA 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.”
According to his official bio, Dr. Drew Weissman’s laboratory focuses on the study of RNA and innate immune system biology and the application of these findings to vaccine research and gene therapy. There are three main projects in his laboratory. The first project began through the use of mRNA encoding antigen as a delivery system to load dendritic cells to promote broad immune responses as part of a vaccine. This project has expanded to include basic studies of RNA immunogenicity and translation and the development of applications for gene therapy. The second project develops new HIV envelope immunogens that can induce broad responses and cross-reactive neutralizing antibodies. The third project continues previous studies that identified a protein found on DC, macrophages, and epithelial cells that binds HIV envelope with high affinity. The main focus of this project is testing whether this and related molecules function in vivo to promote HIV genital tract infection.
