The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to biochemists Catalin Kariko and Drew Weissman for their discoveries of nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. Their names are representatives of the Nobel Committee announced At a ceremony in Stockholm.
The discoveries of the two Nobel laureates were critical to the development of an effective mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020.
“With groundbreaking discoveries that have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates have contributed to an unprecedented pace of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in the modern world,” the Nobel committee said in a statement. expression.
Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman specialize in RNA study. Together, they succeeded in discovering nucleoside modifications that suppress the immunogenicity of RNA. Scientists hold US patents on the use of non-immunogenic RNA modified with nucleosides. This technology has been licensed to BioNTech and Moderna to develop protein replacement technologies and has also been used in COVID-19 vaccines.
Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2022 accepted To Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo for his work in evolutionary genetics. Pääbo is one of the founders of paleogenetics, a discipline that studies early humans and hominids using genetic methods. Pääbo received the award for his discoveries regarding human evolution and the genomes of extinct hominins, a subfamily of primates that today includes humans and apes. In particular, teams of scientists led by Paabo managed to decipher the Neanderthal genome and discover a new hominid species, Denisovan man.
It was previously known that the amount of the Nobel Prize was determined. augmented For 1 million Swedish crowns.