2023 was a chaotic year. In the midst of 2023, however, a beacon of hope emerged in the world of biology. Weissman and Karikó were given the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They were recognized for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of mRNA vaccines against Covid. Their research allowed us to understand how mRNA interacts with our immune system.
Vaccines contain a portion of the virus, whether dead or alive. They help stimulate the formation of an immune response to a pathogen. It allows our body to get a head start in the fight against the viruses.
In vitro transcription techniques were developed in the 1980s, enabling the efficient synthesis of mRNA without the need for cell culture and advancing the field of molecular biology applications. But obstacles like instability and transport problems made it difficult to develop mRNA technology for clinical application. Throughout the 1990s, Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó remained unfazed in her belief that mRNA could be used for therapy. Working along with University of Pennsylvania immunologist Drew Weissman, they sought to comprehend the ways in which different forms of RNA interacted with the immune system. This partnership set the stage for future developments in mRNA technology, which overcame challenges to produce significant progress in the creation of vaccines and treatments.
Unlike mRNA from mammalian cells, Karikó and Weissman found that in vitro produced mRNA caused an inflammatory response in dendritic cells. Taking into account the fact that chemical changes are commonly found in the bases of RNA derived from mammalian cells, they postulated that the inflammatory response could be caused by the absence of these changes in mRNA generated in vitro. They discovered that adding such alterations nearly completely reduced the inflammatory response through trials introducing different base modifications to mRNA, which led to a paradigm shift in our knowledge of how cells react to diverse types of mRNA. The groundwork for the therapeutic application of mRNA was established by this revolutionary finding in 2005. Base changes were found to dramatically improve protein production in addition to reducing inflammatory responses in studies conducted in 2008 and 2010.
2010 saw a rise in interest in mRNA technology, which prompted several businesses to create techniques. Vaccines against the Zika virus and MERS-CoV, a cousin of SARS-CoV-2, were developed. Two quickly developed base-modified mRNA vaccines that target the SARS-CoV-2 surface protein were brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. These vaccinations were approved in December 2020 and have a 95% protective effectiveness. The development of mRNA vaccines has been remarkably flexible and quick, which has created opportunities for using the platform to fight additional infectious illnesses. In the future, the technology may also be used to treat specific cancers and deliver therapeutic proteins.
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