Nobel Prize in medicine goes to pair of mRNA researchers
Two spent decades working on advancements that led to creation of COVID vaccine
The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to two scientists whose research laid the groundwork for messenger RNA vaccines that transformed the threat of the coronavirus pandemic.
Early in her career, Katalin Kariko, 68, a Hungarian-born scientist, saw mRNA’s medical potential and pursued it with ferocious and single-minded tenacity that exiled her to the outskirts of science. After a chance meeting over the photocopier at the University of Pennsylvania 25 years ago, she worked closely with Drew Weissman, 64, an immunologist who saw the potential for the technology to create a new kind of vaccine.
Today, the power of messenger RNA is obvious: It is the backbone of COVID-19 vaccines that were developed in record time, providing a crucial shield of protection that helped save millions of lives and allowed people to reunite safely with loved ones. But for decades, the idea this fragile genetic material could be a medicine was a tantalizing, unlikely possibility dangling at the margins of mainstream science.
Kariko and Weissman’s complementary knowledge helped to unravel a way to chemically tweak messenger RNA, turning basic biology into a useful medical technology ready to change the world when the pandemic struck. Their discovery is incorporated into the COVID-19 vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, which have now been administered billions of times.
Since 2021, the pair have been showered with many of the most prestigious prizes in science, leading to the expectation it was a matter of when, not if, they would win a Nobel. In an interview, Weissman said he sleeps poorly, so he was awake early Monday morning at his home in Philadelphia. But he wasn’t expecting a call from Stockholm this year, figuring it would be at least another six years until the work would be recognized.
He learned of the prize not from the Nobel committee initially, but from Kariko, who sent him a 4 a.m. text asking him if a Nobel official had called him yet. They congratulated each other in disbelief, still wondering if it was a prank before they saw the official announcement online.
“It was a wonderful moment,” Weissman said, who celebrated with his wife and on FaceTime with his older daughter.
Kariko grew up in a small Hungarian village. Her father was a butcher, her mother a bookkeeper. She moved to the United States with her husband and toddler daughter in the mid-1980s and worked in a few different research jobs before landing a junior position at the University of Pennsylvania. Her track was an unlikely one for a future Nobel laureate — she struggled for years to raise the grant funding essential for a scientific career and never secured tenure.
Weissman was a fellow in National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci’s lab for several years early in his career, and Fauci said he was a “very serious, committed, brilliant mind who was very creative.”