NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE 2023

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Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman have received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on the development of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

What are mRNA vaccines?

• mRNA stands for messenger RNA. It is a form of nucleic acid which carries genetic information.
• The mRNA vaccine makes an effort, like other vaccines, to stimulate the immune system to develop antibodies that aid in preventing an infection from a live virus.
• However, mRNA vaccines only introduce a portion of the genetic information that matches to a viral protein, unlike conventional vaccines that inject weak or dead bacteria or viruses to stimulate the immune system. Spike protein is a common name for this protein, which is often located on the viral membrane. As a result, the mRNA vaccination spares users exposure to the virus itself.
• But one major issue with mRNA vaccines is that they have to be frozen between -90 and -50 degrees Celsius. They need to be thawed between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, where they can stay for up to a month. They can be kept frozen for up to two weeks in industrial freezers.

Advantages of mRNA vaccine

• It is not contagious and cannot integrate into host DNA.
•  Scaling up and designing mRNA can be done quickly.
• produce a higher immune response than conventional vaccines.

What work did Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman do for mRNA vaccines?

• Early synthetic mRNA prototypes that caused inflammatory reactions made them inappropriate for use in medicine, which posed a substantial barrier to the development of mRNA vaccines.
• Karikó and Weissman discovered a way to stop these inflammatory responses and dramatically increase the production of the target protein by making small chemical changes to the mRNA molecules.
• This discovery served as the foundation for the creation of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

What is the potential of mRNA technology beyond Covid-19?

• Early research indicates that mRNA technology has promise as a cancer treatment, particularly for pancreatic and melanoma.
• Investigating a fresh method to treat autoimmune illnesses is one of the other mRNA research directions now being pursued.And for untreatable illnesses like sickle cell disease, mRNA technology is being investigated as a potential substitute for gene therapy.

 

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