The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to two scientists who developed the technology to create the mRNA Covid vaccine.

Professors Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman will share the award.

The technology was tested before the pandemic, but it is now available to millions of people around the world to protect them against severe forms of Covid-19.

Similar mRNA technology is currently being studied for other diseases, including cancer.

The Nobel Prize Committee said:
“The laureates have contributed to vaccine development at unprecedented speed, despite one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”

Both were informed by phone of their win this morning and said they were “overwhelmed”.

Vaccines train the immune system to recognize and fight threats such as viruses or bacteria.

Traditional vaccine technology relies on dead or weakened versions of the original virus or bacteria – or uses fragments of the infectious agent.

In contrast, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines use a completely different approach.

During the Covid pandemic, both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines are based on mRNA technology.

Professors Kariko and Weissman met in the early 1990s while working at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, when their interest in mRNA was considered a scientific failure.

Covid mRNA vaccines contain genetic instructions for making a component – ​​a protein – from the coronavirus.

When this substance is injected into the body, our cells begin to produce large amounts of viral proteins.

The immune system recognizes them as foreign, so it attacks and learns to fight the virus, thus having a head start when future infections arise.

The big idea behind this technology is that you can quickly develop a vaccine against almost anything – as long as you know how to use the right genetic instructions.

This makes the vaccine development process much faster and more flexible than traditional methods for vaccine development. There are even experimental approaches that use technology to teach a patient’s body how to fight their own cancer.

Scientists analyze a patient’s tumor, look for abnormal proteins made by the cancer that are not found in healthy tissue, develop vaccines to target these proteins and inject them into the patient .

Professors Kariko and Weissman have made important advances that have allowed the creation of mRNA vaccines.

This principle is inspired by normal human biology. The role of RNA in our bodies is to convert instructions in the genetic code or DNA into proteins that our bodies are made of. However, there have been challenges. But by improving the technology, researchers were able to produce large quantities of the desired protein without causing dangerous levels of inflammation as seen in animal experiments.

This paved the way for the development of vaccine technology for use in humans.

Katalin Kariko is currently a professor at the University of Szeged in Hungary and Drew Weissman remains a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.