NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE TO PIONEERS OF MESSENGER RNA VACCINES

KATALIN KARIKO AND DREW WEISSMAN

These winners have accelerated the development of these vaccines in the face of one of the greatest contemporary threats to human health.
This distinction is accompanied by a record financial reward of eleven million Swedish crowns (approximately 920,000 euros), establishing a new nominal high in the century-old history of the Nobel Prizes.

The Nobel Foundation increased the amount of this endowment in September thanks to a favorable financial situation.
In 2022, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish pioneer of paleogenomics, for his revolutionary work on the complete sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. He founded this discipline which explores ancestral DNA to shed light on contemporary genetics.

Messenger RNA is anything but “experimental”

The awarding of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine vividly underlines that messenger RNA is anything but an “experimental” technology. By rewarding the work of Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman on messenger RNA vaccines, the Academy is undertaking a long and laborious journey of discovery.
25 years ago, in 1997, Hungarian-American researcher Katalin Kariko presented her research on messenger RNA, known since the 1960s, to her new associate, Drew Weissman. At the time, his attempts did not bear fruit, costing him his position as a biochemist at the University of Philadelphia. For several years, despite laboratory changes, his research was unsuccessful: with each test, the RNA caused inflammation in the mice that the vaccine was supposed to protect.
It was only in 2005, after many years of trying, that Kariko and Weissman found success. The idea of ​​modifying RNA so as not to alert the immune system turns out to be the key to this success, the foundation of vaccines as we know them today.

A long and laborious journey of discovery.

However, there is still a long way to go before this innovative technology is adopted by large pharmaceutical companies. Years after the publication of their research, it has attracted little interest from the giants of the pharmaceutical industry. Only Moderna (founded in 2010) and BioNTech (founded in 2008), two biotechnology companies, are interested in the work of the two researchers.

In 2013, Katalin Kariko chose BioNTech.
This is when collaborations with large companies begin: Pfizer in 2018, for the development of a flu vaccine; Sanofi in 2019 for treatment against cancer, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that same year...

Research into vaccines using RNA technology is then carried out on all fronts.
However, it is obviously during the Covid pandemic that these years of efforts bore fruit, with the development of the first messenger RNA vaccine for humans. This is no coincidence: Pfizer is already a partner of BioNTech, and the RNA solution seems to be the most promising for the American giant. For what ? Precisely because this technology, known for decades, has reached a point of maturity.
The first RNA vaccine in humans against rabies, tested in... 2013

The journey of Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman summarizes this long and very long history of the development of modified RNA technology. Since its first use in the laboratory in 1984, hundreds of researchers have worked to develop an effective, and above all, stable solution. What characterizes this technological evolution is much more the obstacles overcome than its speed in reaching the market, as was the case with vaccines against Covid in 2020-2021.
Katalin Kariko's research in the late 1990s certainly propelled RNA forward, but it was not enough. Until the early 2000s, the fragility of modified RNA made its injection ineffective, because it was immediately destroyed.

The solution was to encapsulate it in lipids to prevent its degradation, and it was not until 2012 that this method became established in the scientific community. Again, numerous laboratory replications were required.
As for tests on human subjects, they are not recent. The first RNA vaccine tested on humans was a preventive treatment against rabies, tested in... 2013. Then until 2020, candidate vaccines against the Zika virus, against Ebola, or even H1N1 were used. subject of clinical trials on patients.

The emergency of the Covid pandemic has removed financial and administrative obstacles, while creating enormous demand for a vaccine. This allowed RNA-based treatment against Sars-CoV-2 to arrive earlier than others.

However, calling this vaccine an “experimental” solution is an offense to the winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine, as well as to the multitude of researchers who have contributed to the maturation of this technology.