Two mRNA Researchers Win Nobel Prize in Medicine

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Facts

  • Two University of Pennsylvania scientists, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for research that directly led to the first mRNA COVID vaccines.1
  • Karikó — an adjunct professor at UPenn's Perelman School of Medicine — was a Senior Vice President at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals, which helped produce the vaccines. Meanwhile, Weissman is the director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation.2
  • The pair's first seminal work, published in 2005, described how they overcame obstacles to using in vitro synthetic mRNA technology, such as an inflammatory response by the body that involves the production of harmful cytokines.2
  • Their research was combined with two earlier discoveries; while scientists in Canada developed a fatty coating to help mRNA get inside body cells, American researchers stabilized the coronavirus spike protein that the new mRNA vaccines needed to deliver.3
  • The nearly two-decade-old research is now being used to develop treatments for other diseases, including Mpox — formerly known as Monkey Pox — and influenza, as well as to train the immune system to recognize cancerous tumors.4

Sources: 1Al Jazeera, 2Scientific American, 3Abc news and 4Time.

Narratives

  • Narrative A, as provided by Boston university. After 30 years of research and almost two decades since their breakthrough on mRNA, Karikó and Weissman deserve the celebration and recognition brought by a Nobel Prize. Without their research, billions of life-saving vaccines wouldn't have existed, and the pandemic may have been far worse than it was. Their mRNA-based invention has already been applied to other vaccines and therapeutics, so we can rest assured the applications of their work won't stop at COVID.
  • Narrative B, as provided by The swaddle. The Nobel Prize is an outdated mode of scientific recognition that was historically, and still remains, biased towards men and those working in the Western world. Additionally, rather than encouraging competition between researchers, the Nobel should be replaced with an award that incentivizes cooperation and values other sciences like mathematics and artificial intelligence as well as medicine and physics.

Predictions