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.

Antibodies or immunoglobulins are proteins the immune system produces in response to foreign substances, such as viruses, bacteria, or other pathogens. When antibodies bind to antigens (molecules on the surface of pathogens), they can neutralise the pathogen directly or mark it for destruction by other immune cells.

mRNA, short for messenger RNA, is a molecule that carries instructions from DNA to the cell’s cytoplasm to produce proteins.

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

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prize is a set of five international prizes awarded annually in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace. It was established by the will of Alfred Nobel (the inventor of dynamite). The prizes are awarded by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. They are awarded to individuals who have made the most significant contributions to humanity in their respective fields during the preceding year. The Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901. They are awarded each year on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. Except for the Peace Prize, the Nobel Prizes are presented in Stockholm, Sweden. The Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway.