The scientists behind mRNA vaccine technology have just won a prestigious new medicine award, highlighting their work in the fight against the Covid pandemic -19. Their technology could also help fight many other diseases in the future. The next step ? The Nobel Prize, certainly.
Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman are behind key technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
Everything accelerated in 2005. At the time, the two researchers published a startling discovery about messenger RNA, also known as mRNA, which provides instructions for cells to make proteins. When they added mRNA to cells, they destroyed it instantly. On the other hand, they could prevent this destruction by slightly modifying the mRNA. By adding altered mRNA to the cells, the two researchers could then briefly trick the cells into making the protein of their choice.
The Pfize/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines work on the same principle, instructing our cells to build a specific protein (spike protein) so that the immune system can learn to recognize the pathogen in the future, all without triggering a harmful and excessive immune response in the process.
In the future, the technology may also extend to other diseases. Moderna already effect on an influenza vaccine. The company has also just started a phase I trial to test a messenger RNA vaccine against HIV.
For their work, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman were awarded the 2021 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Prize a few days ago. It is one of the most prestigious in medicine (prizes were not awarded in 2020 due to the pandemic). Ms. Lasker, a medical research activist, and her husband, sometimes considered the father of modern advertising, founded the Lasker Awards in 1945 to honor scientists whose discoveries and clinical advances have helped improve human health.
Earlier this month, the pair also won the Breakthrough Prize, after being honored in August with the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry, awarded for work revolutionaries in medical science. Finally, last February, Karikó and Weissman also won the Rosenstiel Prize.
For many experts, the next step could therefore be the most prestigious:that of the Nobel Prize. In the 75-year history of the prize, 95 Lasker Prize winners have indeed received a Nobel Prize. Similarly, 51 of the 106 previous Horwitz Prize winners have won a Nobel, as have 36 of the 93 Rosenstiel Prize winners.
See you in October to get to the bottom of it. Last year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier, from the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens (Germany), and Jennifer A. Doudna, from the University of Berkeley (California) for the development of the now famous CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing method.
