Previously, Nobel prizes have been given to individuals for breakthroughs that were achieved 30, 40, and 50 years ago, the reason being that it takes a considerable amount of time for these technologies to realize their full potential.
For this year’s recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, it took a mere 15 years.
On Oct. 2, 2023, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that led to the development of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.
Traditionally, to produce vaccines, one must first create a cell culture-based manufacturing facility, which often had taken a lot of time and had prohibited mass production of vaccines. Thus, for decades vaccine researchers have attempted to create a way to vaccinate people without making a mass cell culture. The idea was to inject genetic material such as DNA or RNA directly into the human, thus avoiding the “cell-culture” process altogether.
Photo from Vanderbilt University Medical Center
However, DNA and RNA vaccines were harder to process than traditional vaccines due to their instability. Karikó and Weissman’s lifetime of work on mRNA vaccines made it so that mRNA vaccines were suitable for clinical use.
When COVID-19 broke out in 2019, vaccine companies such as BioNTech and Moderna chose mRNA vaccines as the main type of vaccines against COVID-19. The flexibility and speed of mRNA vaccines made it so that it took less than two years to create a vaccine against COVID-19, effectively saving the lives of billions of people.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine recognized this feat of mRNA vaccines and of Karikó and Weissman’s, explicitly stating that the two scientists “critically contributed to this transformative development during one of the biggest health crises of our time.” Indeed, their achievements had rescued humanity from COVID-19, and is worth a lifetime of praise.
Photos from Nobel Prize Foundation
