The Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to the “fathers” of vaccines against Covid-19

They prompted our immune system to recognize and inactivate the Sars-CoV-2 virus, responsible for Covid-19, opening the era of messenger mRNA vaccines: for this, Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karekó and American immunologist Drew Weissman received the Nobel Prize. Medicine Award. “They have saved millions of lives and prevented serious diseases,” the foundation explained. Nobel Prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm – allowing societies to open up and return to normal conditions of existence. “With their fundamental discoveries about the importance of basic modifications in messenger RNA,” which they made “at an unprecedented pace,” this year’s Nobel laureates “contributed decisively to this transformative development during one of the largest health crises” and “one of the largest “Threats.” On human health in the modern era. For this reason it was decided to award the prize “jointly” to those who can be considered the “fathers” of mRna vaccines, Katalin Carrico and Drew Wiseman, with this official motivation: “For their discoveries regarding modifications of nucleosides that have allowed the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid.”

The discoveries, highlighted by experts at the Nobel Assembly, “were fundamental to the development of mRna vaccines during the pandemic that broke out at the beginning of 2020.” And “revolutionary,” because they “fundamentally changed the understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.”

For the international scientific community, the highest global recognition given in Sweden is also a response to the loud and harmful anti-vaccine campaigns that have often found fertile ground in Italy as well, and even at the political level.

Who are Carrico and Weissman?

Kariko was born in 1955 in Szolnok, Hungary. She completed her doctoral studies at the University of Szeged and continued her studies in the same city until 1985, before moving to the United States, to Temple University in Philadelphia and then to the University of Health Sciences. In Bethesda. In 1989, she worked at the University of Pennsylvania, where she remained until 2013. She then moved into private life, where she served as Vice President of the German company BioNTech Rna Pharmaceuticals. Since 2021, he has been a professor at the University of Szeged, where he taught, and one at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Weisman was born in 1959 in the United States in Lexington (Massachusetts). After receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 1987, he worked at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School and then at the National Institutes of Health. Weissman has worked at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania since 1997.