Nobel Prize in Medicine 2023, mRNA Vaccines, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman

Nobel Prize in Medicine 2023

• Context (TH | IE): The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó and American physician-scientist Drew Weissman. Their work enabled the development of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

What are mRNA Vaccines, and Why were They crucial During COVID-19?

• Vaccines are designed to stimulate the immune system against specific infectious diseases.
• Traditionally, vaccines used weakened or inactivated viruses to stimulate antibody production.
  • As technology advanced, vaccines began using partial viral genetic code instead of the whole virus.
• But large-scale development of these vaccines requires cell culture (growing cells under controlled conditions), which is time-consuming.
• During the COVID-19, this time-consuming way of producing vaccines proved ineffective. This is where mRNA technology proved crucial.
• This technology existed since the 1980s but wasn’t perfected for large-scale vaccine production.
• Basically, mRNA vaccines use genetically engineered mRNA to instruct cells to make the protein needed to fight a particular virus.

What Kariko and Weissman did to Make the mRNA Technology Viable for Vaccines?

• The problem with mRNA vaccines was that the body’s immune system recognised the lab-engineered mRNA as foreign and launched an immune response against it.
• Kariko/Weissman found a way to modify the mRNA, which abolished the immune response generation by bodies against them, making mRNA tech viable for large-scale vaccine production.
• COVID-19 vaccines Moderna (US) and Pfizer (US) used this mRNA technology.
  • Coronavirus, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19 or 2019-nCoV)
  • Proposed Vaccines, Treatments in the Context of COVID-19