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Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman win Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovery of messenger RNA vaccine in scientific fight against Covid-19 pandemic The most important role.
The two researchers will share 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) for their “contribution to the unprecedented pace of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” the Nobel Assembly in Stockholm said on Monday. of awards.
The work of Hungarian scientist Karikó and his American counterpart Weissman directly promoted the rapid development of a messenger RNA-based COVID-19 vaccine by Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer in 2020. The vaccines have played an important role in stemming the growing wave of coronavirus infections, helping authorities lift a host of restrictions on social activities during the pandemic.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the two collaborated at Penn State to discover how to manipulate mRNA, the biological molecule that converts genetic information into proteins, and deliver it to human cells in a stable form.
They study how to prevent the immune system from destroying mRNA so that its instructions for making useful proteins can be applied to drug and vaccine development.
The Nobel committee said their most important research paper in 2005 initially attracted little attention from the scientific community, but interest picked up after follow-up studies in 2008 and 2010. Several biotech companies began working on vaccines against the viral infection, ultimately successfully pushing to produce a COVID-19 vaccine and gain regulatory approval in 2021.
The medicine prize is the first of six Nobel Prizes to be announced this year. The prizes for physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be announced in the coming days.
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