Berlin, Germany.
The obsession of the scientist of Hungarian origin Katalin Kariko for investigating a substance llamada mRNA to combat the diseases it once cost him a place in the faculty of a prestigious American university, which he dismissed the idea like a dead end.
Now, your pioneering work, which paved the way for vaccines against covid-19 dand the Pfizer / BioNTech and Modern laboratories, it could be what saves the world from one 100-year pandemic.
“It simply came to our notice then amazing “, told AFP in a video call from his home in the city of Philadelphia, adding that she was not used to attention after working for years in the dark.
For her, this context demonstrates why “it is important that the science it must be supported by many levels “.
Kariko, 65, spent much of the 1990s writing grant applications to fund their research on the “messenger ribonucleic acid”, genetic molecules that tell the cells what proteins produce, essential to maintain ours living and healthy bodies.
She believed that the MRNA was the key paragraph treat diseases in which they have more proteins of the right kind can help, as in the brain repair after a stroke.
But the University of Pennsylvania, where Kariko was on her way to a chair, decided to break away from the project after the grant rejections. “I was ready for an ascent, and then they degraded me and waited for me to come out the door,” Kariko said.
Kariko didn’t have one yet green card paragraph stay legally in the job market and needed one work to renew your visa. He also knew he couldn’t send his daughter to college without the considerable discount for center staff.
So I decided to persist as lower level researcher, arranging them with a meager salary.
It was a low point in his life and career. However, “I thought … you know, the table (of the laboratories) is here, I just have to do best experiments “.
The experience shaped his philosophy to deal with adversity in all aspects of life. “You have to think hard and then you have to say ‘What can I do?‘Not so waste tu life, ”he explained.
That determination is the hallmark of his family: his daughter Susan France ended up going to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a master ‘s degree and won gold medals with the Olympic team US rowing in 2008 and 2012.
Twin advances
Inside the body, the MRNA delivers the instructions to the cells stored in DNA, the molecules that carry all of us genetic code.
In the late 1980s, much of the scientific community focuses on the use of DNA to administerr gene therapy, but Kariko believed that he MRNA It was also promising, as most of the diseases no children hereditary and they do not need solutions that permanently alter our genetics.
However, he first had to overcome an important problem: in animal experiments, the Synthetic mRNA caused one massive inflammatory response when the immune system detected an invasive element and washe was in a hurry to fight him.
Kariko, along with his main collaborator Drew Weissman, discovered that one of the four building blocks of the Synthetic mRNA it was failing, and I was able to overcome the problem by swapping it for one modified version.
After that he published an article on progress in 2005. Already in 2015, I found a new way to administer mRNA to mice, using a fatty layer called “lipid nanoparticles” that prevent the mRNA from degrading and help place it inside the correct part of the cells.
Those two innovations were key to vaccines against covid-19 developed by Pfizer and his German partner BioNTech, dwhere Kariko is now senior vice president, as well as for the injections produced by Modern.
Both work by giving the human cells instructions for producing a coronavirus surface protein, which simulates a infection and trains the immune system for when he meets the real virus.
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New treatments
He MRNA it degrades quickly and the instructions it gives to the body are not permanent, which makes the technology aan ideal platform for a varied application, Kariko said.
These could go from new vaccines against the dol, faster to develop and more effective than the current generation, even new ones treatments for others diseases.
For example, AstraZeneca ecurrently working on a mRNA treatment for patients with heart failure, which provides signaling proteins that stimulate walnut production blood vessels.