Nobel Prize goes to scientists who made mRNA COVID vaccines possible

The 2023 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, scientists behind the development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

Background: They performed their game-changing research at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on the modification of messenger RNA (mRNA) which thereby became the basis for developing the related vaccines.
* 15 years before the COVID pandemic, Karikó and Weissman published a key finding that replacing uridine with pseudouridine in mRNA eliminated an inflammatory side effect, thereby overcoming a developmental barrier for this new kind of vaccine.

Impact: Their work paved the way for Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech to develop mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines within a year after the emergence of the virus.
* The Nobel Prize committee emphasized that vaccines utilizing this technology have been administered over 13 billion times and are acknowledged to have saved millions of lives.

Visibly Absent: Despite the pivotal contributions of female scientists, Karikó is only the 13th woman to be awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine since its first awarding in 1901.
* This underlines a gender disparity in this field as the total number of laureates in this category stands at 227.

View original article on NPR

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