This year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to the Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó (68) and the American doctor Drew Weissman (64) for the discovery of the technology that made the development of MRI vaccines possible. Thomas Perlmann, Secretary General of the Nobel Committee in Stockholm, announced this at the end of the morning. Karikó and Weissman share the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns (865,000 euros).
Karikó and Weissman had been considered likely candidates for the Nobel Prize for several years, because their discoveries led to a fundamentally new way of making vaccines. These new vaccines, based on RNA fragments of the pathogen, have now proven their value during the corona pandemic.
Also read: Nobody saw anything in Katalin Karikó’s work. But then corona came
Record time
The MRI vaccines have proven to be more successful than traditional vaccines in protecting a large part of the world’s population against the new virus SARS-CoV-2. The relative simplicity with which these types of vaccines can be made allowed them to be produced very quickly in 2020 in response to the new pandemic virus. The two corona vaccines based on this technology, from Pfizer and Moderna, have already been given to people thirteen billion times, making the technology a breakthrough in record time.
Now that MRI vaccines have proven to be safe in practice, vaccine makers have started to make the technology suitable as a remedy for other infectious diseases. The promise is great because in theory smaller diseases are also eligible for control with vaccines and because it would also become easier to combine different vaccines in one injection.