Nobel Prize Awarded to mRNA Pioneers Who Paved the Way for COVID-19 Vaccines

It was an unlikely collaboration, and it began in an unlikely place, but the partnership that Katalin Kariko and Dr. Drew Weissman formed in the 1990s at the University of Pennsylvania has now led to a shared Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Kariko and Weissman were awarded the Nobel for their work in tweaking the genetic material mRNA to make it more amenable to working in vaccines. Their discovery led to the first approved mRNA vaccines, targeting the COVID-19 virus, in 2020. And that success is seeding mRNA-based strategies across a number of different conditions, including other infectious diseases as well as cancer. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Kariko’s husband answered the call from Stockholm early in the morning on Oct. 2 at their home in a Philadelphia suburb. She told nobelprize.org that she initially thought “somebody was just joking.” While she said the conversation involved detailed scientific information that would have been hard to fake, “you never know in these days,” she said. True to their long-time partnership, Kariko then called Weissman to break the good news. In fact, the early morning call likely reminded him of years of similar emails he and Kariko would exchange at dawn when they were working to crack the problem of turning mRNA into reliable therapies. That collaboration began at the copy machine between their offices at the University of Pennsylvania. Kariko was obsessed with mRNA, whi...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news