Nobel Prize for Medicine 2023: All you need to know about Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman's award-winning mRNA Covid vaccines
- On October 3, 2023, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman became the joint winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Their Nobel Prize-winning work involves developing the technology behind mRNA Covid vaccines
- Their research dates back to as far as the 1990s, with the first breakthrough in 2005
- Back then, research on mRNA was sidelined by the scientific community’s excitement with DNA and gene therapy
- Karikó struggled to win grants for her research and in 2013, she was “kicked out and forced to retire” from her lab at University of Pennsylvania
- However, it was during the 2020 Covid pandemic that their discoveries became critical in the development of mRNA COVID vaccines
- mRNA vaccines work by teaching our cells how to develop a protein, that in turn triggers an immune reaction against the given germ
- Karikó and Weissman’s findings have also given us new perspectives on how mRNA interacts with our immune system