Nobel For Medicine
The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó and American physician-scientist Drew Weissman.
They had been feted for “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modification that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19”.
Dr. Karikó is only the 13th woman to win the prize.
mRNA vaccines
mRNA stands for messenger RNA, a type of molecule that carries instructions from the DNA to a cell’s cytoplasm, where those messages are ‘read’ to produce various proteins.
In the late 1980s, scientists realised that mRNA could become the basis for a new kind of vaccines if some hurdles could be overcome.
The idea was to inject the body with a modified mRNA that would instruct cells to build a certain protein, which could then provoke the body’s immune system to ‘attack’ it as well as prepare itself to encounters with the same protein in future.
This protein could be something produced by a virus — such as the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2.
But the mRNA would have to survive its journey inside the body and be able to enter a cell.
COMMENTS