The Brainchild Behind The Covid-19 Vaccine
While it may sound like a theme out of a Hollywood sci-fi movie to have humanity depend upon a lone scientist’s heroics in saving the world from an inexplicable disease, the reality is not far from fiction (or science-fiction in this case).
The world may be a bit divided between the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, but the companies have much more in common than you’d think. A little over a year into the covid-19 pandemic, the two billion-dollar companies are fighting to prove their vaccine’s superiority over the other’s. What they have in common? Synthetic messenger RNA.
Synthetic messenger RNA or mRNA is a genetic technology that for decades had remained a biological roadblock. This roadblock had cost Dr. Katalin Kariko her faculty position at a prestigious US university, where the university deemed her research as a dead-end. Her obsession with mRNA was such that she spent decade after decade since 1990 attempting to harness the power of mRNA. The idea though was considered too far-fetched for government grants, corporate funding, and even support by her own colleagues.
The job of mRNA is to deliver cells the instructions stored in DNA, the molecules that carry all our genetic code, and much of the scientific community was focused on using DNA to deliver gene therapy. Dr. Kariko though, believed that mRNA could also be used to cure diseases that are not hereditary and don’t need solutions that permanently alter our genetics.
The major problem: in animal experiments, synthetic mRNA was causing a massive inflammatory response as the immune system sensed an invader and rushed to fight it.
Dr. Kariko discovered that one of the four building blocks of the synthetic mRNA was at fault, which could be overcome by swapping it out with a modified version. In 2015, she and her main collaborator Drew Weissman also found a new way to deliver mRNA into mice, using a fatty coating called “lipid nanoparticles” that prevents the mRNA from degrading and helps place it inside the right part of cells.
Their research papers and innovations were (thankfully!) noticed by Moderna as well as Pfizer and its partner BioNTech and acted as a key to the Covid-19 vaccines developed by both companies.
Today, as immunization programs roll out throughout the world and millions of lives are saved, we know who exactly to thank for it!
