Nobel Prize in medicine won by two scientists for ‘groundbreaking findings’ on mRNA Covid-19 vaccines
This year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their work on mRNA vaccines, a crucial tool in curtailing the spread of Covid-19, CNN reports.
The Nobel Prize committee announced the prestigious honor, seen as the pinnacle of scientific achievement, in Sweden on Monday.
It praised the scientists’ “groundbreaking findings,” which the committee said “fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.”
Karikó and Weissman published their results in a 2005 paper that received little attention at the time, it said, but later laid the foundation for critically important developments that served humanity during the coronavirus pandemic.
“The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” the committee added in a statement.
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.”
Karikó, a Hungarian-American biochemist, and Weissman, an American physician, are both professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work became the foundation for Pfizer and its Germany-based partner BioNTech, as well as Moderna, to use a new approach to produce vaccines that use messenger RNA or mRNA.
The revolutionary technology has opened a new chapter of medicine. It can potentially be harnessed to develop vaccines against other diseases like malaria, RSV and HIV. It also offers a new approach to infectious disease like cancer, with the prospect of personalized vaccines.
