Two scientists win Nobel Prize for Covid vaccine technology
Katalin Kariko, 68, and Drew Weissman, 64, are longstanding colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in the US.
The Nobel Committee in Stockholm on Monday announced that Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which paved the path for the groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccines.
The two “contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times,” the jury said.
The mRNA vaccines were approved for use in December 2020, and together with other Covid vaccines “have saved millions of lives and prevented severe disease in many more,” the jury said.
Kariko, 68, and Weissman, 64, longstanding colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, have won a slew of awards for their research, including the prestigious Lasker Award in 2021, often seen as a precursor to the Nobel.
In the 1990s, Kariko believed mRNA held the key to treating diseases where having more of the right kind of protein can help — like repairing the brain after a stroke.
But the University of Pennsylvania, where Kariko was on track for a professorship, decided to pull the plug after the grant rejections piled up.
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