This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to the developer of the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccine that ended the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19) epidemic. It has been three years since the mRNA vaccine was commercialized in 2020.
The Nobel Committee at Karolinska Institutet of Medicine in Sweden announced on the 2nd (local time) that it had selected Currico Cuterlin, senior vice president of Biontech, and Professor Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania as the winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The decisive moment for winning the Nobel Prize was the COVID-19 pandemic and the commercialization of mRNA vaccines, but the two laureates’ main achievements were research done in 2008, much earlier than this. In 2008, the two winners published research results in the international academic journal ‘Molecular Therapy’ showing that modifying some of the bases that make up mRNA can suppress inflammation in the body, which was considered a limitation of mRNA vaccines.
The Nobel Committee said, “The unprecedented speed of vaccine development at a time when one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times has significantly contributed to ending the COVID-19 pandemic.” Senior Vice President Currico and Professor Weissman will share the prize money of 11 million kronor (about 1.36 billion won), a 10% increase from last year.
It was already expected that the two winners would win the Nobel Prize. The two scientists were selected as winners of the ‘2022 Breakthrough Award’ in life sciences in 2021, and last year they won the Lasker Award, which is considered the gateway to the Nobel Prize. The Lasker Award is an award created in 1945 by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, established by an American philanthropist, to encourage research in the field of physiology and medicine.
“When a new disease appears, we have no weapons,” said Han Hee-cheol, a professor at Korea University Medical School. “We have prevented many deaths worldwide with the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, and this research achievement has had such a great impact that we have been mentioned as recipients of the Physiology or Medicine Prize for a long time.” “He said.
mRNA vaccines operate on a completely different principle from the protein-based vaccines that have been used in vaccine development. Protein vaccines require the process of producing and purifying proteins from DNA through cell culture. It takes at least several years to build and produce a specialized process.
On the other hand, mRNA vaccines can be synthesized in a test tube without this process as long as there is base sequence information containing information about the desired protein. This reduces the time it takes to develop a vaccine. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, we succeeded in making a finished vaccine product within 100 days after discovering the virus’s genetic information.
The strengths of mRNA vaccines have been well known since the 1980s. With the advent of technology to produce mRNA in test tubes without cell culture in the 1980s, the idea was that vaccines could be developed more quickly and cheaper than traditional vaccines. However, mRNA made in a test tube was easily broken and caused a serious inflammatory response in the body. For this reason, mRNA vaccines and RNA therapeutics were ignored by academia until the mid-2000s.
The two laureates’ 2008 research first demonstrated the feasibility of mRNA vaccines. Among the four bases that make up mRNA, including adenine (A), uridine (U), guanine (G), and cytosine (C), modifying uridine can reduce the problematic inflammatory response and increase the production of the desired protein. It has been confirmed that It was a decisive study that made it possible to administer the mRNA vaccine, which had been just an idea, to humans.
Hyukjin Lee, a professor at Ewha Womans University College of Pharmacy who served as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Professor Robert Langer, founder of Moderna, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said, “This research has opened the way to develop RNA therapeutics, a cutting-edge biopharmaceutical.”
The two winners had a difficult journey before receiving the Nobel Prize. Senior Vice President Currico began research on mRNA-based gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990, but suffered difficulties such as having his research funding cut off and his professor title taken away due to his failure to produce meaningful research results.
However, Senior Vice President Currico did not give up on mRNA research even though he moved to various universities, and eventually achieved achievements that led him to win the Nobel Prize together with Professor Weissman. Professor Han said, “The research that produces these achievements is not just fancy research that was popular at one time,” and added, “It is an achievement achieved through consistent investment and effort.”
It is also worth noting that Senior Vice President Currico is a female scientist. Recently, the activity of female scientists has been increasing, such as Professor Emmanuel Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany and Professor Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), who developed the gene scissors ‘CRISPR’ and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020, but still. The number of female awardees is around 4%. Of the total 640 awardees so far, only 25 are female.
The Nobel Committee plans to announce the winners of the Physics Prize (3rd), Chemistry (4th), Literature (5th), Peace Prize (6th), and Economics Prize (9th), starting with the Physiology or Medicine Prize on the 2nd.
Source: Donga
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.