![]() ![]() ![]() Working with Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 2000s, Karikó engineered synthetic mRNA molecules that could avoid the body’s defenses. “It was so theoretical at that time, no-one was really doing this stuff,” says Dr David Scales, an assistant professor of medicine at Cornell University who worked with Karikó as a student. For years, this was such a major obstacle that few scientists even considered using it for vaccines. ![]() ![]() “We couldn’t dream of using it on humans,” Karikó says. The body violently rejects RNA from outside sources-probably to avoid being hijacked by viruses and other pathogens-and often the RNA proved so toxic that it killed the lab animals it was tested on. Moderna has taken to calling mRNA therapies the “software of life,” or an “operating system” for medicine.īut, like so many other theoretically attractive propositions in science, it was stacked with practical problems. If you can synthesize it in a lab and deliver it to cells, you can theoretically tell them to make a specific tool-a viral antigen, or a cancer-blocking molecule, or more heart tissue-all in their own language. The concept behind mRNA as a drug is strikingly simple: it is the molecule that your own cells use to carry instructions from your genes, written in a simple four-letter chemical language. The science always said it would “work like a charm,” she says, rattling off small-scale studies from the past two decades. She was deeply impressed with the scale of the Covid vaccine rollout, but seems almost impatient with how long it took people to come around to her fascination with mRNA. She is an inveterate scientist, peppering conversations with references in academic format-name, experiment, year-and constantly looking to the next frontier. Karikó is one of the nerve centres of the mRNA world. On October 2 2023, she and immunologist Drew Weissman were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on mRNA technology. Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian biochemist, started working with mRNA as early as 1989 her research at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-2000s laid the foundation for both the BioNTech and Moderna vaccines (Karikó is a consultant on RNA pharmaceuticals for BioNTech, and was previously a senior vice president at the company). Not everyone was so surprised that mRNA vaccines passed their first test with flying colors. This is not just a replacement we will be coming up with other new medical innovations that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.” “There are so many more things we can do. Many older vaccine platforms will not survive.” But, he says, the impact will go beyond what we already know. “It will be transformative, there’s no question. Lots of older vaccine platforms will be gone-replaced-in a few years, or at least greatly diminished.” “Covid turned that on its head mRNA vaccines quickly came out as the big winner. So you can usually see change coming,” says Hartaj Singh, an industry analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. “Biotech generally doesn’t have as much disruption as the computer tech industry-development times are long, it’s heavily regulated. mRNA turned out to be a vanishingly rare thing in the world of science and medicine: a promising and potentially transformative technology that not only survived its first big test, but delivered beyond most people’s wildest expectations. But both had long believed that their mRNA technology, which uses simple genetic instructions as a payload, could outpace traditional vaccines, which rely on the often-painstaking assembly of living viruses or their isolated parts. In fact, neither had ever had a single drug approved before. Neither company was a household name before the pandemic. BioNTech-and US-based Moderna, which announced similar results later the same week-shattered that conventional timeline. Modern vaccines often stretch out past a decade of development. Talking heads often referenced that the previous fastest-ever vaccine developed, for mumps back in 1967, took four years. Early in the pandemic, the conventional wisdom was that, even with all the stops pulled, a vaccine would take at least a year and a half to develop. The arrival of a vaccine before the close of 2020 was an unexpected turn of events. ![]()
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