MRNA vaccines are based on decades of research.
Katalin Kariko, the woman who spent her life trying to learn how to control MRNA was born in 1955 in Kisújszállás, a city of 10,000, that was located 100 kilometers from the capital of Hungary, Budapest. Her childhood home didn’t have running water, a television and a refrigerator.
Her mother was a bookkeeper, her father was a butcher, and she enjoyed watching him father cut open a pig. She would observe the animal’s viscera and heart and her older sister would run into the house and didn’t want to see any part of it. Always interested in science she was third in country in biology in the 8th grade.
In college she learned about messenger RNA and decided to try to learn how to control the message and tell cells what to make. She spent three years working in a Hungarian lab. In 1985 it ran out of money and she went to US. At the time Hungary lay behind the iron curtain and only a limited amount of money could be taken out of country. She and husband sold their car and stuffed the cash payment into her daughter’s teddy bear.
Katalin then flew to Philadelphia and got a job at the University of Pennsylvania as a low level researcher. Her daughter was two and a half years old and they didn't know anybody in the United States. Katalin worked hard, then during one particularly horrible week she found out she had cancer. At the time her husband had gone back to Hungary to pick up his green card and got stranded there because of some visa issue, meaning he couldn’t come back for six months. She recalls “really struggling,” and rethinking what she would do with her life.
In 1989 Kariko was hired as a researcher by the University of Pennsylvania, and she continued to struggle with messenger RNA. In 1995 her applications for grant funding were rejected and she was taken demoted—removed from the tenure track. A few years later, while waiting her turn at the department photo copy machine, she met Drew Weissman, a department M.D. Both were working on RNA and they decided to work together to solve her problem. When she injected mRNA molecules into an animal, the molecules were highly inflammatory and were quickly destroyed by the creature’s immune system.
In the 1940s and early 50’s Oswald Avery and others proved DNA was a chemical substance. Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling took x-ray diffraction photos of DNA fibers. and Watson and Crick used her photo to deduce the structure of DNA. DNA has a “twisted spiral shape like a corkscrew.” It is composed of long strands of paired nucleotides. The A’s (adenines) of one chain are bonded to the T (Thymines) of the adjacent chain and C’S (cytosines) are bonded to G’S Guanines.
When a cell reproduces, the two strands of DNA separate
and each length of DNA became a template for a complementary new chain.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15202433/
https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/sc/feature/doublehelix
During the subsequent decade scientists believed that sections of the DNA carry a code that determined the structure of proteins. Some theorized that the plans for these proteins are copied by a type of RNA they called messenger RNA. Each messenger carries the blueprint for a single protein to a “ribosome” in the cytoplasm of the cell. The ribosome uses the “plan” to determine the sequence of the amino acids in the polypeptide it creates. Once created the polypeptides fold and become proteins. In 1961 the Frenchman François Gros proved the theory was right. Messenger RNA exists. That meant that it was theoretically possible to produce messenger RNA that could be injected into a person and would tell cells to make a specific protein.
RNA is a string of four nucleotides: adenine, cytosine, uracil, and guanine. The researchers hoped to dodge the cells tendency to destroy their RNA by altering the Uracil. They eventually developed a slightly altered Uracil that fooled the ribosome and the body’s immune system. When the artificial MRNA was used it survived and worked as well as the real m RNA.
BioNTech was founded in 2008 by Turkish-born Ugur Sahin and his wife, Özlem Türeci in Mainz, Germany. They were among the few scientists who understood the tremendous potential of the Karikó-Weissman discovery and hired Karikó in 2013 to oversee the mRNA research.
Using the new technology, the small BioNTech, along with giant Pfizer, developed the coronavirus vaccine. U.S. based Moderna’s vaccine is also based on the mRNA technology.
(Karikó’s daughter, Susan Francia is now a rower. She won Olympic gold medals in 2008 in Beijing and in 2012 in London.)
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