{SAVING HUMANITY FROM COVID} - Kariko, Weissman win medicine Nobel for work that enabled mRNA vaccines

In 2020, as the world frantically tried - amid lockdowns, disinformation and fear to build a vaccine to battle and control the pandemic, messenger RNA (mRNA) technology fine-tuned by biochemical scientists Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman paved the way for the first weapon against Covid-19.

On Monday, Kariko and Weissman were awarded the Nobel Medicine Prize for they, as the jury said, "contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times".

The first mRNA vaccines were approved for use against the illness in December, 2020, less than 10 months after the pandemic was declared. Together with other Covid vaccines, the mRNA doses "have saved millions of lives and prevented severe disease in many more", the jury said.

Kariko, 68, and Weissman, 64, longstanding colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, have already won a slew of awards for their research.

mRNA as a potential for therapeutic use was first mooted in 1990s but it hardly translated into practical use. What Kariko and Weissman did, put simply, is cracked the last piece of the puzzle to make the platform usable.

MEDICINE NUB They swapped out a basic building block of mRNA called uridine for a related molecule called pseudouridine, allowing strands of mRNA to get their message to cells without triggering an immune attack.

They released their findings in a groundbreaking paper in 2005.

But the true nature of their discovery would be visible only during the pandemic, when the platform led to not just some of the most potent vaccines, but also the ones that could be produced the quickest, even though they were so expensive that they remain out of reach for the Global South even today.