Hungarian biochemist Katalin Kariko is on the awards circuit. The World Health Organization (WHO) celebrates it, in Budapest they painted it on the side of a building and it even appeared in the Women of the Year section of Glamor Magazine. Together with his research partner, Drew Weissman, he won the Lasker-DeBakey Prize for Clinical Medical Research, an honor that in many cases has preceded the Nobel Prize.
It’s a sea change for Kariko, who struggled for years to get research funding. He dedicated his career to the study of messenger RNA, long considered too delicate and unwieldy to be of much use.
The discoveries that Kariko and Weissman made helped change all that.
“Many, many people contributed to it, and I was just one of them ”, Kariko said at a WHO event in Berlin in September. “I’m just representing all those fellow scientists.”.
Kariko and Weissman met while waiting to use a Xerox machine to copy hundreds of academic journal articles. In 2005, the duo published a paper showing how to modify messenger RNA to bypass a cell’s defenses. They were shocked and disappointed when the scientific world never contacted them.
Kariko said that she felt like Cassandra, the princess of cursed Greek mythology because even if she prophesied the truth, they never believed her.
“Our phones never rang ”, dice Weissman. “I think that even though we published that article, they kept thinking that it was too difficult to work with RNA”.
Phones are ringing as scientists study messenger RNA to treat diseases from HIV to malaria, multiple sclerosis and cancer.
Kariko and Weissman’s discovery is “fundamental for this whole field”Says Derrick Rossi, co-founder of Moderna, the maker of mRNA vaccines. “I think it will make them win a Nobel Prize because it really is what allows these mRNA vaccines and any mRNA therapy in the future”.
In the event of the WHO In Berlin, Kariko, now BioNTech’s Senior Vice President, called for support for other ideas that may come up that sound far-fetched.
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