2023-10-02 20:30:43
Katalin Kariko (r) and Drew Weissman sit on a bench and share sweets. That was 2020 in Pennsylvania. Image: dpa
Persistence, luck and perseverance: the path of the two newly crowned laureates from their obsession to the Nobel Prize in Medicine was paved with stumbling blocks. A lesson in the modern spirit of research.
At the beginning of the corona pandemic, no one believed that it would be possible to contain the pandemic quickly with a vaccine. The development of vaccines from inactivated viruses or viral proteins is resource- and cost-intensive – not good conditions for a quick vaccine solution in the face of an exceptional global situation. The fact that things turned out differently with SARS-CoV2 is based on the discoveries of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine.
The Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó and the American immunologist Drew Weissman had published the crucial recipe for the development of an mRNA-based vaccine fifteen years earlier. At the beginning of 2020, this knowledge only had to be transferred to SARS-CoV-2. The two prize winners not only fundamentally changed our understanding of the interactions between mRNA and the immune system, but also contributed to the mRNA vaccines being developed in record time during one of the greatest threats to humanity, the Nobel Prize Committee writes in its statement. The vaccines would have saved countless people’s lives, prevented many serious COVID-19 illnesses and ensured that life returned to normal.
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