Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman developed the technology which led to Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines.
  • edric@lemm.eeEnglish
    353·
    1 year ago

    As they should. Not only for covid, but the development of mRNA vaccines in general opens the gate for more effective vaccines in the future.

    • charliespider@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      It’s an absolute game changer.

      People tried to compare the COVID vaccine development time to previous vaccines without understanding the difference in how the mRNA vaccines are made. You essentially just need to sequence the virus’s genome (which is miraculously easy to do these days because of other amazing people’s incredible efforts), then target a protein from the virus’s exterior and use that snippet in the mRNA vaccine. This radically reduces the time it takes to develop a vaccine as well as increase it’s effectiveness because of the control you have over the vaccine’s selected target.

        • charliespider@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          My understanding is that that’s what’s used to extract the targeted protein marker from the virus genome, so not only does it help, it’s a key component in developing an mRNA vaccine.

  • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    This is by far the fastest turn-around I’ve ever seen between the actual research and winning the Nobel. The internet has changed the rate of recognition to some extent, but this is a bonkers time-frame compared to most. The first time Kariko pubished on this, it was only in 2005 and it was a highly tentative idea at the time, and they didn’t have much in the way of positive results until 2010. I mean, for context, the guy who came up with the idea of “frontier orbitals” and their importance (aka HOMO/LUMO) had to wait 30 years, and that work was hugely important in organic chemistry (and has applications in numerous other fields like semiconductors and nanotechnology). Hell, I can’t think of a single time when the research was conducted less than 20 years before winning the Nobel (at least in physics and chemistry; physiology is not my field, so maybe things move faster over there).

    That said, Kariko and Weissman absolutely deserve the award and I’m happy that people were so quick to recognize the impact of their research (even if did take a global pandemic to bring it to the attention of the average citizen).