Two American scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the development of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 and could be used in the future to create other shots.
Katalin Karikó, a professor at Sagan’s University in Hungary and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Drew Weissman, of the University of Pennsylvania, were awarded the prize for "their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system."
Thomas Perlmann, the secretary of the Nobel Assembly who announced the prize, said both scientists were "overwhelmed" by the news.
Before COVID-19, mRNA vaccines were already being tested for other diseases like Zika, influenza and rabies, but the pandemic brought more attention to this approach, Karikó said.
Traditionally, making vaccines required growing viruses, or pieces of viruses, often in giant vats of cells or, like most flu shots, in chicken eggs, and then purifying them before next steps in brewing shots.
The messenger RNA approach is radically different.
Experts say it starts with a snippet of genetic code that carries instructions for making proteins.
Pick the right virus protein to target, and the body turns into a mini vaccine factory.
Karikó was a senior vice president at BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to make one of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The BioNTech website says that since 2022, she has been an external consultant. She is the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize in medicine. Weissman is a professor and director of the Penn Institute for RNA innovations at the University of Pennsylvania.
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