The coronavirus | The Nobel Prize

 

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. Penn Institute/Penn Medicine/TT 

  

The coronavirus | The Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize to duo behind "groundbreaking" covid vaccine 

 

Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman are awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the Nobel Committee announces. They receive the prize for having developed the mRNA technology that resulted in the development of the covid vaccine early in the pandemic. 

 

"The pioneering research of the laureates has fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with the immune system," writes the Nobel Assembly in a press release.  

 

- They were very happy. It was wonderful to talk to them. Both were overwhelmed, says Thomas Perlmann at the Karolinska Institute's Nobel Committee, who contacted the laureates on Monday morning. 

 

Karikó and Weissman have been favorites for several years in a row. Among other things, SVT's science reporter Johan Bergendorff judged that the duo were the most likely prize winners. 

 

- Research is now underway to develop new mRNA vaccines against, among other things, Lyme disease, influenza and cancer. So it is a technology of the future, he says.  

 

 

Screenshot from SVT's broadcast about the Nobel Prize. SVT.  

 

Expert: They thought someone would call back in 2005  

 

The breakthrough in the study of mRNA was achieved by Nobel laureates Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman already in 2005, says Elham Rostam, researcher in neurosurgery, to SVT Nyheter. That's when they discovered that you could modify mRNA to make vaccines. Rostam says that she has seen interviews with the research duo where they told how, with the breakthrough, they believed that "now the phones will ring" and that "it will be so big".  

 

But nothing happened. Not until many years later.  

 

Because when the corona pandemic began to spread around the world, tests and studies for mRNA vaccines in other diseases had come relatively far. What the researchers did then was to adapt the vaccine for covid-19.  

 

- It was really fun. It's always fun with prizes for things that are of such clear benefit to humanity, says Gustaf Källstrand, Nobel historian, who was also a guest on SVT's broadcast.