THEthe work of Pfizer Biontechm scientist Katalin Karikó68 years old, and of Drew Weissman, led to the anti-Covid vaccine revolution. That revolution is worth the prize today Nobel Prize for Medicine.
Katalin Karikó won the 2023 Nobel Prize for Medicine
Born in communist Hungary, she was 21 years old when, in 1976 at the University of Szeged, Hungary, she took a lesson on mRNA, or messenger RNA, discovered a few years earlier. For 40 years Katalin Karikó has tried to manipulate the “DNA copy” molecule and use it as a Trojan horse to instruct cells to produce the proteins they need. She has become the recognized pioneer of laboratory-synthesized mRNA: his discoveries were responsible for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna anti-Covid vaccines. She is the scientist who paved the way for a revolution that few believed in. But she’s also aan icon of tenacity and non-conformism.
In 1985 she left Hungary and set off for America with a handful of dollars sewn into the belly of her daughter’s doll. Since then she has fought with all her might to make what she had glimpsed a reality. For almost four decades, when “I couldn’t get the results I wanted,” the spur to move forward came from “the importance of thinking critically” and “believing in yourself,” she said.
The first positive results, in the 90s, and then in 2005, together with Drew (Andrew) Weissman, 64 years old, his American colleague. Together, I managed to solve a fundamental problem: preventing the cell from rejecting the received mRNA, perceiving it as an “invader”. It is the invention that brought both of them the Nobel Prize.
mRNA, from anti-cancer vaccines to Covid
In 2013, when she was already 58 years old, she was then hired by BioNTech, which was trying to use mRNA to create anti-cancer vaccines. When Covid hit, in Wuhan in January 2020, the company knew it already had the potential weapon to fight it in its hands. The mRNA flu vaccines, which he was developing thanks to KK’s work and were in phase 3 trials, ready for testing in humans, could be easily adapted. «All that needed to be done» explained the scientist «was replace the specific sequence of the flu with that of the Coronavirus”.
The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Medicine to Katalin Karikó
As Nature writes, scientists often receive the award decades after their groundbreaking research: Nearly half of the winners receive the Prize more than 20 years after the research that made them worthy of receiving the Nobel. On the contrary, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman won the award “for the discoveries that have made the development of effective mRNA-based vaccines against Covid possible”: therefore very recent research. The scientists will receive a reward of just under one million euros (11 million SEK). The prize will be awarded in two months, on December 10th in Oslo.
The thirteenth female scientist in history to receive the Nobel
Katalin Karikó is the 13th woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine, the most important of the numerous scientific awards he has received so far together with his American colleague Drew Weissman. Together, in 2021, for example, they won one of the Breakthrough prizes, known as the Oscars of science, for the same reason that was announced today by the Nobel Foundation.
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