Nobel Prize of Physiology or Medicine 2023 toKatalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries on nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19.
In an article in the journal Immunity in 2005, Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman and their colleagues produced messenger RNAs which mimicked those from mammals, and not bacteria, and showed that they did not trigger exaggerated inflammatory responses from dendritic cells, hence allowing good conditions for vaccination. In 2015, they made a new breakthrough for RNA vaccination by designing lipid droplets to protect RNA vaccines, which otherwise were too fragile, and to make them enter cells, so as to induce efficient vaccination. The SARS-Cov2 vaccine was developed very fast, but on the strong basis of thirty years of research on RNA vaccines from these scientists and from many others. Covid-19 RNA vaccines are efficient at 92-96% against the possibility to develop severe forms of Covid-19 (i.e., forms requiring hospitalization and potentially causing death or heavy sequelae). Université Paris-Cité’s Immunology and Immunopathology IHM extends enthusiastic congratulations to Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman and all their colleagues who made this extraordinary medical and scientific leap possible.