The Nobel Prize in Medicine Weissman investigates a universal vaccine for all coronaviruses

He new Nobel Prize in Medicine Drew Weissman, whose research is at the base of the technology that made Covid-19 vaccines possible, believes there is still room for improvement and is working to achieve universal immunization against the coronavirus.

This year, the American immunologist won the award along with the Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó for creating the technology that allows the use of messenger RNA as a therapeutic agent, an award that they will collect along with the rest of the winners next Sunday.

This research was crucial to developing the first vaccines of the pandemic, saving millions of lives and preventing serious illnesses in many more, according to what the Karolinska Institute, in charge of awarding this Nobel Prize, said when announcing the prize.

Weissman (1959) told EFE that there is still room to improve vaccines based on messenger RNA for Covid-19, a virus that mutates in a similar way to the flu, which means that new vaccines must be made every year because the virus It is no longer blocked by that of the previous year.

However, the new Nobel Prize winner is already working, both in his laboratory at the School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania (USA), and with an international group, on a “pancoronavirus” or universal vaccine, “that will protect against all ”.

This immunization, which “maybe useful for five years, but we don’t know that yet,” will prevent any new coronavirus, even those that can pass to people, from bats, for example, and any of the variants of the current covid-19.

The vaccine candidate is heading to the clinical trial phase (with people), as there is one that will begin in Thailand, “probably within six or eight months” and is also working on another, starting “probably within a year”, in collaboration with Duke University (USA).

The center of Weissman and Karikó’s research is messenger RNA (mRNA) or messenger ribonucleic acid, a type of molecule that transports the genetic information necessary from one part of the cell to another to make the proteins that allow us to live.

Both scientists, at that time at the University of Pennsylvania, discovered how to modify RNA molecules to use them as a therapeutic agent without the human immune system destroying them and devised a system to put it into nanoparticles, which prevents its rapid degradation.

Although during the pandemic, this technology became the basis for the rapid development of vaccines, its potential is very great in the most different areas of medicine, and Weissman estimated that “the main changes will occur in the next 10 or 20 years.” .

Currently – he said – his team has seven vaccines in phase one of clinical trials to prevent, among others, norovirus (which causes vomiting and diarrhea) or bacteria such as ‘Clostridioides difficile’, which causes infection in the large intestine, without forget a universal one for the flu.

In addition, it has created a gene therapy program against malaria, which it hopes to begin administering in the next two years, among “many other therapies in development.”

Weissman has been researching a vaccine for HIV for years, in fact that was his main objective when he met Karikó by chance in 1997, in a university photocopier. She was already researching messenger RNA and there would begin a close collaboration of more than two decades. Among the vaccine projects that Weissman’s laboratory is investigating there are “a couple” aimed at HIV, which “will probably take between five and seven years” to reach phase three (the last) of clinical trials.

In addition, he highlighted a program to cure the disease, which is already being tested in macaque models and “in six months we will know if it works.” If that were the case, the next step would be testing with patients.

The future of messenger RNA is very promising, but at the beginning of the research its potential received little attention from other scientists. However, today’s new Nobel Prize winners always had it clear.

“Twenty-five years ago, Katie and I were listing everything messenger RNA could do, but we joked that we would probably die before it made its mark on the world. However, we have survived until now,” she said.