A follow up to Joel Eissenberg’s commentary on mRNA and how it came to be at BioNTech. This seemed interesting enough to add another post on mRNA discovery. Some more detail . . . Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to scientists who laid foundation for messenger RNA vaccines (msn.com), Carolyn Y. Johnson The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to two scientists whose research laid the groundwork for messenger RNA vaccines that transformed the threat of the coronavirus pandemic. Early in her career, Katalin Kariko, 68, a Hungarian-born scientist, saw mRNA’s medical potential and pursued it with ferocious and single-minded tenacity exiling her to the outskirts of science. A chance meeting over a photocopier at the University of Pennsylvania
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A follow up to Joel Eissenberg’s commentary on mRNA and how it came to be at BioNTech. This seemed interesting enough to add another post on mRNA discovery. Some more detail . . .
Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to scientists who laid foundation for messenger RNA vaccines (msn.com), Carolyn Y. Johnson
The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded Monday to two scientists whose research laid the groundwork for messenger RNA vaccines that transformed the threat of the coronavirus pandemic.
Early in her career, Katalin Kariko, 68, a Hungarian-born scientist, saw mRNA’s medical potential and pursued it with ferocious and single-minded tenacity exiling her to the outskirts of science. A chance meeting over a photocopier at the University of Pennsylvania 25 years ago, aligned her closely with Drew Weissman, an immunologist who saw similar potential for the technology to create a new kind of vaccine.
Today, the power of messenger RNA is obvious:
It is the backbone of coronavirus vaccines that were developed in record time and have been given billions of times. But for decades, the idea this fragile genetic material could be a medicine was a tantalizing, unlikely possibility dangling at the margins of mainstream science.
Kariko and Weissman’s complementary knowledge helped to unravel a way to chemically tweak messenger RNA, turning basic biology into a useful medical technology ready to change the world when the pandemic struck. Their discovery is incorporated into the coronavirus vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, which have now been administered billions of times. For Kariko, it was awe-inspiring ideas, unnoticed successes, and repeated rejections
Since 2021, the pair have been showered with many of the most prestigious prizes in science, leading to the expectation that it was a matter of when, not if, they would win a Nobel. In an interview, Drew Weissman said he sleeps poorly, so he was awake early Monday morning at his home in Philadelphia. He was not expecting a call from Stockholm this year. It was thought at least another six years would pass until the work would be recognized.
He learned of the prize not from the Nobel committee initially, but from Katalin Kariko. She sent him a text saying she’d received the call and the committee was trying to track down his phone number. They congratulated each other in disbelief, before he got the official call at around 5:20 a.m.
“It was a wonderful moment,” Drew Weissman said, who celebrated with his wife and on FaceTime with his daughter.
Thomas Perlmann, secretary general of the Nobel Assembly, said that when he spoke to Kariko early Monday, she reflected on her abrupt change in circumstances. A decade ago, she was anything but a traditional scientific success. She had struggled for years to get grant funding essential for a scientific career. She did not have tenure at the University of Pennsylvania.
In an interview for the Nobel Prize website, Katalin Kariko recalled she “was kicked out and forced to retire!” from Penn exactly 10 years ago. Still, she was not done with science. Kariko moved away from her family to live in Germany and work for a little-known start-up called BioNTech which was working on turning mRNA into medicine.
“I decided to go to Germany, to a biotech company not having a website, leaving my husband, and my family behind. What the hell am I doing? For one week, every night, I cried myself to sleep,” Kariko said in a 2021 interview with The Washington Post. Drew Weissman helped make ‘hugs and closeness possible again’
Eventually, BioNTech would partner with Pfizer to create an mRNA vaccine against the coronavirus.
“Every once in a while, you get a discovery that is transformative in that it’s not only for a specific discovery itself, but it essentially impacts multiple areas of science. That is what mRNA technology is,” said Anthony S. Fauci, a professor at Georgetown University and the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Drew Weissman worked in Fauci’s lab for several years early in his career. Fauci said Weissman and Kariko brought different skill sets to a difficult scientific problem. He praised their “persistent, dogged” work over decades. Fauci said. . .
“There was a great deal of skepticism early on. They didn’t have a lot of support, but they persisted. It was an amazingly productive collaboration.”
Messenger RNA is a code written in four letters that spell out the genetic instructions for building proteins in cells. Harnessing the ability to use the body’s own machinery to build proteins had vast therapeutic potential in theory However, Kariko and Weissman discovered a fundamental problem. By itself, messenger RNA triggered an inflammatory response.
In 2005, the pair discovered how to chemically modify one of the letters of RNA to nearly eliminate the inflammatory response. The Nobel committee recognized that fundamental work. At the time, the researchers were disappointed when it attracted little scientific notice.
Eventually, biotechnology companies became interested in the technology, but it was not until the pandemic and the need to build vaccines at unprecedented speed. It was then its power became clear to the general public.
Weissman said he is most excited about extending messenger RNA to fight new diseases. He hopes to use messenger RNA to develop a gene therapy to treat sickle cell disease that could be given as a single shot, opening up a cure to the less wealthy areas of the world where the disease is more common such as in Africa and India.
Cutting-edge experimental therapies for sickle cell are on the horizon. They require a patients’ own bone marrow cells to be removed, modified in a specialized laboratory and returned to them. A laborious and expensive process not practical to be administered in countries without vast medical resources.
The work is still in the early stages of development. Drew Weissman explained . . .
“Their approach costs a few million dollars per person, and in my view will never be useful worldwide. Ours is: You line people up, give them an IV injection and they’re cured. That can be done anywhere in the world easily.”
The Nobel Assembly cited the importance of the work for contributing to “the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”
Who invented the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine Technology? Angry Bear