The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to the inventors of mRNA vaccines, whose work allowed Pfizer and Moderna to create vaccines against COVID-19

American biochemist Drew Weissman and Hungarian scientist Katalin Karikó won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. From the 1990s to 2013, they worked on creating a new generation of vaccines based on synthesized mRNA. A decade later, their work has led to Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to 68-year-old Szolnok, Hungary-born Katalin Kariko (senior vice president of BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals) and 64-year-old professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Drew Weissman. Their work played a “crucial role” in the development of COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic, the Nobel committee said in a communiqué: “With discoveries that fundamentally changed the understanding of how messenger RNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to an unprecedented pace of vaccine development.”.pdf).

Vaccination stimulates the response of the human immune system to various pathogens, the Nobel Committee recalls.

The first were vaccines based on inactivated or weakened viruses – for example, back in 1951, Max Theiler from South Africa received a prize for vaccination against yellow fever. The next step was vector vaccines based on individual components of viruses – proteins encoding their genetic code. This is exactly what, for example, the Russian coronavirus vaccine Sputnik V is.

And in the 1980s, the concept of using so-called messenger RNA (mRNA) for vaccination was developed. “In our cells, genetic information encoded in DNA is transferred to mRNA, which is used as a template for protein production,” the committee explains. But the first experiments with the synthesis of mRNA in vitro showed their instability: the human immune system perceived them as full-fledged viruses, which caused undesirable inflammatory reactions. Since the 1990s, University of Pennsylvania associate professor Katalin Kariko and her university colleague Weissman have been trying to solve the problem. In 2005, they found nucleoside components responsible for RNA instability in the cell. By changing the nucleosides, scientists had a tool that actually made it possible to fool human cells: they no longer mistook the mRNA for a virus.

Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor Konstantin Severinov explains that Catalina Carico was able to “identify the differences that determined the difference in the behavior of RNA isolated from cells or obtained in vitro.” “She used this information to produce synthetic RNA, which in its properties did not differ from RNA isolated from cells. This paved the way for the creation of RNA vaccines, which provide effective synthesis of target proteins in the human body,” he explains. In 2006 and 2013, Catalin Carico and Drew Weissman received patents for the use of modified nucleosides to reduce the antiviral immune response to mRNA. A decade later, their discoveries allowed Pfizer and Moderna to produce COVID-19 vaccines.

“Classic vaccines, such as influenza, contain an inactivated strain of the virus. Therefore, such vaccines need to be updated frequently, because the strains change frequently. There is no virus in mRNA vaccines, but only a piece of its genetic information – in fact, instructions for assembling a surface protein,” explains molecular biologist, researcher at Moscow State University Sergei Kharitonov. According to him, the laureates managed to create “an innovative system for delivering information to a cell, allowing the cell to be directed to produce what we need”: “In the case of vaccines, we are talking about stimulating protein production. With coronavirus, this allows the body to prepare, develop an immune response and be ready for infection.”

Mr. Severinov says that Katalin Kariko tried to solve the problem of RNA instability “for quite a long time”: “They laughed at her, she was kicked out of two universities, many scientists thought that she was doing nonsense.”

He draws attention to the fact that even Ms. Kariko’s scientific articles cited by the Nobel Committee were published in “mediocre, not Nobel-level” journals. Mr. Kharitonov says that cancer treatment methods are also being developed based on the principle discovered by the laureates.

When asked how scientifically breakthrough the vector technology used to make the Russian Sputnik V vaccine is, Mr. Severinov said that its technology is “quite standard” and “ideologically” dating back to the Pasteur and Comrades vaccines (in 1886 Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine against rabies.— “Kommersant”).

In 2021, Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman have already received the Breakthrough Prize for their development (founded in 2013, among the founders are entrepreneurs Sergey Brin, Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg).

The Nobel Prize presentation will take place on December 10 in Stockholm: the laureates will share 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million). Let us recall that in 2022 the award in physiology and medicine went to the Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominids (primates) and human evolution.

Alexander Voronov