Opinion Nobel Prize for Medicine acknowledges possibilities of mRNA vaccines for a range of diseases, from cancer to malaria and AIDS

Every October, Katalin Kariko’s mother would faithfully listen to the radio, hoping to catch the news that her daughter had finally won a Nobel Prize. “Many scientists work very very hard,” Kariko recalled pointing out to her, in an interview published by the University of Pennsylvania this week. And forget a Nobel, Kariko had never even got a grant for her dogged pursuit to unlock the potential of mRNA to help cure diseases, with her research being described as “unworkable”. That she has, along with her fellow pursuer of the seemingly impossible, Drew Weissman, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine this year, comes as a vindication of their conviction that mRNA research holds the key to unlocking the future of medicine.

Kariko and Weissman sought to use mRNA — the messenger which carries instructions from DNA to our cells on manufacturing specific proteins — as an agent that could help the body develop its own cures. This went against the prevailing orthodoxy which had long dismissed the possibility of introducing mRNA into the body without it being attacked by the body’s immune system. This had been seen in numerous trials on animals, in whom synthetic mRNA led to severe inflammation. Kariko and Weissman’s discovery was that the mRNA could be modified in a specific way, so that the immune system wouldn’t attack it. But this elicited little interest and the 2005 paper documenting the breakthrough was largely ignored. It drew attention only in 2020, when its potential to develop effective vaccines quickly to arrest Covid-19’s devastating sweep through the world, began to be explored.

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The vaccines developed using Kariko and Weissman’s discovery saved millions of lives. Beyond that, their work has also opened a wide vista of possibilities for tackling a range of other diseases, from cancer — with mRNA being possibly tailored to target individual patients’ tumours — to malaria, HIV and Zika. The Nobel Prize is an acknowledgement of this promise.