Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman won Nobel Prize today for COVID-19 vaccines. Karikó and Weissman have the honor of their groundbreaking findings for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. These were very important in preventing the spread of COVID-19. Both of them played a major role in suppressing the lethal virus COVID-19.

The Nobel Prize Committee announced the winners for this outstanding scientific achievement today in Sweden. The Committee said that their innovation changed their views on how mRNA interacts with our immune system.

BREAKING NEWS
The 2023 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/Y62uJDlNMj

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 2, 2023

Karikó and Weissman first published their work and results in a 2005 paper. But, it received little attention at that time but it was acclaimed during the pandemic. At that time, their work importance was realized by people.

Karikó is a Hungarian-American biochemist while Weissman is an American physician. Both of them are professors at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rickard Sandberg, one of the members of the Nobel Prize Committee in medicine said these mRNA vaccines played a major role in saving the lives of millions of people and reducing the severity of COVID-19 spread.

Their work set a different approach for vaccine development companies like Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna. After that, these companies started to develop vaccines using messenger RNA and mRNA.

Karikó and Weissman won the Nobel Prize today because they both have really helped in changing the dynamics of vaccine development.

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