STOCKHOLM: Resear­chers Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for work on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that paved the way for ground-breaking Covid-19 vaccines.

The pair, who had been tipped as favourites, “contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times”, the jury said.

The World Health Orga­ni­sation declared Covid-19 a pandemic in March 2020 and the first mRNA vaccines were approved for use against the illness in December that year.

Billions of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna doses have been injected around the world since then. Together with other Covid vaccines, they “have saved millions of lives and prevented severe disease in many more”, the jury said.

Jury says laureates have saved ‘millions of lives’

Kariko, 68, and Weiss­man, 64, longstanding colleagues at the Univer­sity of Pennsyl­vania in the United States, have already won a slew of awards for their research.

In recognising the duo this year, the Nobel committee broke with its usual practice of honouring decades-old discoveries, aimed at ensuring it has stood the test of time.

While the prizewinning research dates back to 2005, the first vaccines to use the mRNA technology came out just three years ago.

Unlike traditional vaccines which use weakened virus or a key piece of the virus’ protein, mRNA vaccines provide the genetic molecules that tell cells what proteins to make, which simulates an infection and trains the immune system for when it encounters the real virus.

The idea was first demonstrated in 1990 but it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that Weissman, of the US, and Hungarian-born Kariko developed a technique to control a dangerous inflammatory respo­nse seen in animals exposed to these molecules, opening the way to develop safe human vaccines.

The honour is particularly sweet for Kariko, the 13th woman to win the Medicine Prize, who toiled in obscurity for years and struggled to convince her superiors of the need for research on messenger ribonucleic acid.

Speaking to Swedish Radio, she said her late mother always had faith in her, listening to the Nobel prize announcements “year after year” hoping to hear her daughter’s name called out.

“Unfortunately, five years ago she passed at the age of 89. She might be listening from above,” Kariko said.

Thomas Perlmann, the secretary general of the Nobel Assembly, called Kariko “an extraordinary and unusual scientist” who “resisted any temptation” to do “something easier”.

Published in Dawn, October 3rd, 2023