WASHINGTON (AFP) – Hungarian-born scientist Catalin Kariko’s tendency to search for a substance called mRNA to fight the disease was losing its faculty position at a prestigious U.S. university, which rejected the idea as a dead term.
Now, her pioneering work – which paved the way for the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines – is saving the world from 100 years of epidemics.
“This is just an unbelievable type,” she told AFP in a video from her Philadelphia home, adding that she had not been able to concentrate after years of working in obscurity.
Receive the Times of Israel’s daily edition via email and never miss our best stories free sign up
It shows why “that important science should be supported on many levels.”
Kariko (1990) spent most of the 1990s writing fundraising programs to fund his investigation into “messenger ribonucleic acid” – genetic molecules that tell cells what to make proteins needed to keep our bodies alive and healthy. Is.
She believed mRNA was key to treating diseases where the right type of protein could help – such as brain repair after a stroke.
Illustrated. On November 23, 2020, a syringe and bottle read ‘Covid-19 vaccine’ next to the Pfizer company logo. (Joel Saget / AFP)
But the University of Pennsylvania, where Kariko was on the way to the professorship, decided to pull the plug after the grant was denied.
He said, ‘I was up for it, and then they devalued me and expected me to get out the door.’
Kariko did not yet have a green card and needed a job to renew his visa. She also knew that she would not be able to put her daughter through a college lodge without the permission of the strict staff.
She decided to continue as a low-paid researcher, breaking into a meager salary.
It was a low point in her life and career, but “I just thought … you know, the (lab) bench is here, I have to do better experiments.
Experience shaped his vision to face difficulties in every aspect of life.
“Think and then at the end of it, you have to say ‘What can I do?’
“Because then you won’t waste your life.”
The decision runs in the family – his daughter Susan Francia went to Penn, where she earned a master’s degree, and won gold medals with the U.S. Olympic rowing team in 2008 and 2012.
Two successes
Inside the body, mRNA cells carry DNA. Delivers instructions stored in, the molecules that carry all our genetic code.
By the late 1980s, much of the scientific community focused on using DNA to deliver genetic therapies, but activists believed that most diseases were not hereditary and did not require solutions that could permanently alter our genetics.
At first though, he had to overcome a big problem: in animal experiments, the synthetic mRNA was generating an inflammatory response as the immune system sensed the invader and rushed to fight him.
Sandra Lindsay (L), a nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, on December 14, 2020 in Queens Borough, New York, at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, Dr. Mic. Inoculated by the COVID-19 vaccine by Michelle Chester. (Mark Lenihan / Pool / AFP)
Kariko, along with his main collaborator Drew Weissmann, discovered that one of the four building blocks of synthetic mRNA was defective – and that they could fix the problem by replacing it with a modified version.
They published a paper on success in 2005. Then, in 2015, they found a new way to deliver mRNA to rats, using a fatty coating called “lipid nanoparticles”, which protects the mRNA from degradation and helps keep it inside the right side. Cells.
Both of these innovations were key to the Covid-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer and its German partner Bioentech, where Kariko is now senior vice president, as well as shots produced by Moderna.
Both act by instructing human cells to make surface proteins of coronavirus, which mimic infection and train the immune system when the actual virus arrives.
New treatment
MRNA degrades rapidly and the instructions it gives to the body are not permanent, making the technology an ideal platform for a variety of applications, Kariko said.
This can range from a new influenza vaccine to a faster and more effective new disease treatment than the current generation.
For example, AstraZeneca is currently working on mRNA treatment for patients with heart failure, delivering signaling proteins that stimulate the production of new blood vessels.
Although she doesn’t want to make much of it, as a foreign-born woman in a male-dominated field, she sometimes seemed underestimated – saying people would approach her after lectures and ask “Who is your supervisor?”
“They always thought‘ with that female accent, there should be someone behind her who is gifted or something, ’he said.
Now, with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines all going well, it’s not hard to imagine the Nobel Prize committee, Kariko and fellow mRNA rewarding researchers.
It would be a bitter sweet for Kariko, at the end of which the mother would ask why she was not chosen after the announcements every year.
“I’ve never received a (federal) grant in my life, I’m no one, not even faculty.” To which his mother replied: “But you work hard!”
