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Among the recipients of this year’s Lasker Awards, announced on Friday, were two scientists whose work has been crucial in the development of vaccines against Covid-19.
The prizes are among the most prestigious awards in medicine, and dozens of Lasker laureates have received the Nobel Prize.
Katalin Kariko, Senior Vice President of BioNTech, and Dr. Drew Weissman, Professor of Vaccine Research at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, shared this year’s Lasker-DeBakey Prize for Clinical Medical Research.
In retrospect, their breakthrough in 2005 was evident when Dr Kariko and Dr Weissman proudly published a startling discovery they made about messenger RNA, also known as mRNA, which provides instructions for cells to make. proteins. Scientists have noticed that when they add mRNA to cells, cells instantly destroy it. But they could prevent this destruction by modifying the mRNA slightly. When they added the altered mRNA to the cells, it could briefly trick the cells into making the protein of their choice.
But at the time, most scientists were not interested in the technology, which would become the cornerstone of mRNA vaccines, because they believed there were better ways to immunize.
Their article, published in Immunity in 2005 after multiple rejections by other journals, received little attention. The discovery seemed esoteric.
Dr Weissman and Dr Kariko wrote grants to continue their work. Their candidacies were rejected. Finally, two biotech companies noticed the work: Moderna, in the United States, and BioNTech, in Germany. The companies have studied the use of mRNA vaccines against influenza, cytomegalovirus and other diseases, but none have emerged from clinical trials for years.
Then the coronavirus appeared. The surprisingly effective vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech use the modification discovered by Dr Kariko and Dr Weissman.
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