Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman

The 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has been awarded to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman for their work on mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet announced on Monday.

“The discoveries by the two Nobel Laureates were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020,” the Nobel Prize committee said in a statement.

“Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”

Kariko and Weissman published their work on mRNA vaccines in a 2005 paper but received little attention at the time, the Nobel Prize committee said, but their findings later laid the foundation for critically important developments.

Kariko, an Hungarian-American biochemist, and Weissman, an American Physicist, are both professors at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work became the foundation for the development of COVID-19 vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna.

The messenger RNA is a singular strand of genetic code that cells can read and use to make a protein. In the case of this vaccine the mRNA instructs cells in the body to induce a spike in a particular piece of the virus, causing the immune system to detect it as foreign and prepare to attack when an actual infection occurs.

Kariko and Weiss’ design was selected to for developing the covid vaccine because of its quick turnaround – it only requires the genetic sequence of the virus causing the pandemic and not the virus itself.