Medicine Nobel 2023 awarded to Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman for their work in mRNA vaccines

The 2023 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been jointly awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modification that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19”, The Royal Swedish Academy of Science announced on October 2, 2023.

Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times, the press release said.

As early as the 1990s, biochemist Katalin Karikó had understood the significance of mRNA as a therapeutic. However, she and her colleague and immunologist, Drew Weissman’s research came to fruition in 2005 when they published a paper that investigated the impact of nucleoside modification and its effect on the immune system.

Further research papers published in 2008 and 2010, helped fine-tune the initial discovery and helped reduce both inflammatory responses and increased protein production thereby removing critical obstacles which hindered the clinical applications of mRNA.

The pair, who had been tipped as favourites, “contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” the jury said, according to AFP.

In honouring the pair this year, the Nobel committee in Stockholm broke with its usual practice of honouring decades-old research.

While the prize-winning science dates back to 2005, the first vaccines to use the mRNA technology were those made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna against COVID-19.