This year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. The two laid the foundation for the technology behind the mRNA vaccines.
Without the pioneering work of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna would never have been able to produce mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, and the coronavirus pandemic would have taken a different course.
Karikó and Weissman’s work has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The Swedish Karolinska Institute has just announced this.
During the coronavirus pandemic, mRNA technology was used for new vaccines for the first time. ‘mRNA’ stands for ‘messenger RNA’. mRNA transports the building plan of a specific protein to the place in body cells where that protein is produced.
In the case of the corona vaccines, the mRNA code is in the fluid injected into the arm muscles. The muscle cells must then produce the coronavirus’s crown proteins (the ‘spikes’).
This stimulates the immune system of the vaccinated person. They then produce antibodies against the crown proteins of the coronavirus, among other things. If you are infected with SARS-CoV-2, the risk of a serious outcome is smaller.