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How mRNA became a vaccine game-changer
22 minutes to read
By: David Crow
The molecule behind the Pfizer and Moderna jabs has turned the Covid tide. Can it revolutionise medicine? Not for the first time, Katalin Kariko was trying to convince a sceptic to take her scientific discoveries seriously. It was 2004, and she had spent about 15 years investigating messenger RNA, the genetic material that acts as a kind of courier in the human body, transporting recipes from our DNA to the part of the cell that produces proteins.
After countless false starts and wrong turns, she had made a breakthrough and wanted to file a patent. But to do so she had to win over an intellectual property officer at the University of Pennsylvania, where she then worked as a researcher. Their meeting was going badly. He was not very enthusiastic, he kept on asking, What s it good for? recalls Kariko. I was just so disappointed that he wasn t getting it.
Source: Getty Images
My mother could have been a doctor Purdue, premed, 1938 but like so many women of her era, she got married, started a family, and became a de facto pediatrician for six unruly and often calamity-prone children. She was the one to take us to the doctor for our shots and the one who trooped us down to the emergency room conveniently just a block away from home when we did something really stupid.
Mothers have long been recognized as healthcare decision makers within the family, and that may well be the case when COVID-19 vaccinations become available to children and adolescents. Kaiser Health News reports that more women than men are getting their COVID-19 vaccines, even though more men than women are dying of the disease, and that is about par for the course for us guys.
Apr 15, 2021
The call came early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Drew Weissman, an infectious diseases professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in messenger RNA, received a query from a Chinese company interested in using the new technology to make a vaccine against the coronavirus.
The technology, which effectively turns the body’s cells into tiny vaccine-making factories, has since become the breakout star of the COVID-19 era, underpinning shots made by Moderna Inc. and the Pfizer Inc./BioNTech SE partnership which have been among the most effective in fighting the disease. Before the coronavirus hit, though, the experimental science had yet to receive regulatory approval for use against any illness let alone against the mysterious infection.