European Commission President praises ‘pioneering work’ of Nobel laureates in medicine

This Monday, the President of the European Commission congratulated Nobel Prize winners in medicine Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, highlighting their “pioneering work” in discoveries that have enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19.

“Congratulations to Katalin Karikó from Hungary and Drew Weissman from the USA for being awarded the Nobel Prize. Their pioneering work paved the way for mRNA vaccines,” Ursula von der Leyen wrote in a post on the social network X (formerly Twitter), emphasizing that “this recognition shows the critical role of science in the fight against Covid-19 and in freeing the world from the pandemic “

Hungarian scientist Katalin Karikó is a professor at Sagan University in Hungary and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania. American physician and researcher Drew Weissman conducted his award-winning research with Kariko at the University of Pennsylvania, said Nobel Assembly Secretary Thomas Perlmann, who announced the award in Stockholm.

“The discoveries of two Nobel laureates played a fundamental role in the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020. Thanks to their groundbreaking discoveries, which fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, laureate scientists have contributed to an unprecedented pace of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health of our time,” the Nobel Assembly said in a statement.

The two researchers observed that dendritic cells recognize the mRNA “in vitro” as a foreign substance, which leads to its activation and the release of inflammatory signaling molecules. They wondered why mRNA transcribed “in vitro” was considered foreign, while mRNA from mammalian cells did not produce the same response.

In their research, they created different variants of mRNA, each with unique chemical changes in their bases, which they delivered to dendritic cells. “The results were unexpected: the inflammatory response virtually disappeared when the basic modifications were incorporated into the mRNA,” the statement said.

“This was a paradigm shift in understanding how cells recognize and respond to different forms of mRNA. Kariko and Weissman immediately realized that their discovery had enormous implications for the use of mRNA as a therapy,” he adds.

These results were published in 2005, fifteen years before the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is the first Nobel Prize announced and will be followed in the coming days by awards in physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.