Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Evening Standard
Evening Standard
World
Daniel Keane

Scientists behind mRNA Covid-19 vaccine win Nobel Prize

The scientists who developed the technology that led to the mRNA Covid vaccines have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Dr Katalin Kariko and Dr Drew Weissman were awarded the prize on Monday for contributing to an “unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times”.

mRNA vaccines were first rolled out by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna at the end of 2020 and are highly effective at preventing serious disease from Covid. Widespread vaccination has helped to end the pandemic.

The mRNA technology works by sending genetic instructions to cells to boost the production of proteins and antigens. These proteins are then used as blueprints to indicate which cells to search and destroy.

During the pandemic, mRNA vaccines were tweaked to produce Covid's “spike protein”.

Scientists believe that mRNA jabs could eventually be used to treat cancer and sickle cell disease.

Rickard Sandberg, a member of the Nobel Prize in medicine committee, said: “mRNA vaccines together with other Covid-19 vaccines have been administered over 13 billion times. Together they have saved millions of lives, prevented severe Covid-19, reduced the overall disease burden and enabled societies to open up again.

“This year’s Nobel Prize recognizes their basic science discovery that fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with immune system.”

Dr Kariko was senior vice president and head of RNA protein replacement at BioNTech until 2022 and has since acted as an adviser to the company, while Dr Weissman works as a professor in vaccine research at the Perelman School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Last year's medicine prize went to Swede Svante Paabo for sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans, and for discovering a previously unknown human relative, the Denisovans.

Past winners also include Alexander Fleming, who shared the 1945 prize for the discovery of penicillin.

The remaining five awards will be unveiled in the coming days.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.