Katalin Kariko, Drew Weissman Secures Nobel Prize For Medicine

Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which cleared the door for the 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 Nobel committee in Stockholm deviated from its typical practice of honoring decades-old research by honoring the pair this year. While the award-winning research dates back to 2005, the first vaccinations to leverage mRNA technology were those developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna to combat Covid-19. Kariko of Hungary and Weissman of the United States, longstanding colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, have won a slew of awards for their research, including the prestigious Lasker Award in 2021, often seen as a precursor to the Nobel.

Unlike traditional vaccines which use a 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,as per World News. The concept was originally shown in 1990, but it wasn't until the mid-2000s that Weissman and Kariko established a method to reduce a harmful inflammatory reactionseen in animals exposed to these molecules, paving the door for safe human vaccinations to be made. The mRNA technology developed by Kariko and Weissman is currently being utilized to explore new therapies for diseases and ailments such as cancer, influenza, and heart failure.