Nobel Prize awarded to work behind COVID-19 vaccine

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Nobel Prize Awarded to mRNA Pioneers Who Paved the Way for a COVID-19 Vaccine By Alice Park Senior Health Correspondent For science, it was a lightning quick recognition. Three years after the first mRNA-based vaccines became available, to prevent COVID-19, the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded to two scientists who made those vaccines possible. Katalin Kariko and Dr. Drew Weissman were recognized for their work modifying the genetic material mRNA to make it more useful in treatments like vaccines. When they met at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1990s, Kariko had been a longtime champion of mRNA technology, but struggled to convince the rest of the scientific community of its promise since RNA was notoriously unstable and had not produced any meaningful treatments. Weissman was working on developing an HIV vaccine, and thought an mRNA approach might be worth a try. The rest is now Nobel history. Here are some of the highlights of their journey: mRNA theoretically held a lot of promise in being able to treat genetic and infectious diseases, but also tended to aggravate the immune system, creating a dangerous inflammatory reaction. Kariko and Weissman spent decades figuring out that changing the mRNA code slightly would make it less prone to stimulating this aggressive inflammatory response. Their discovery made the COVID-19 vaccines possible, and is now being studied in vaccines against other infectious diseases, as well as against cancer. READ MORE

What Else to Read Why the Supplement Berberine Is Not ‘Nature’s Ozempic’ By Haley Weiss The popular supplement berberine may result in some modest weight loss, but it's nothing like Ozempic and other semaglutide drugs. Read More » How Bladder Cancer Differs in Women and Younger Adults By Markham Heid Figuring out the causes of age and sex disparities is an important area of bladder cancer research. Read More » Is Seaweed Healthy? Here’s What Experts Say By Jamie Ducharme Certain types may be contaminated. (Originally published in 2019.) Read More » Alcohol Might Improve Heart Health by Reducing Your Stress By Haley Weiss A new study finds that light-to-moderate drinking has lasting effects on the brain's stress system. Read More » How Grief Upsets Your Gut Health By Connie Chang and Juli Fraga Grief can throw the body off course, upsetting the gastrointestinal tract. Read More »

ONE LAST READ Emergency rooms are unprepared to treat children Nothing is scarier for a parent than having to rush a child to the emergency room, but only 14% of hospital ERs in the U.S. are certified to treat kids, according to an investigation by Liz Essley Whyte and Melanie Evans in the Wall Street Journal. That means their doctors may not see enough children to recognize life threatening illnesses, may be giving the wrong drug dosages, or they lack equipment meant for smaller bodies—lapses that contributed to the deaths of 1,440 children between 2012 and 2017 because ERs were not prepared. Read More »

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