Biochemist Katalín Karikó, one of the scientists behind the covid-19 vaccines, regrets that the public knows people like the Kardashian sisters, but do not wonder about the scientist who invented the pill that saves her life every morning.
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Karikó will receive this Thursday in Bilbao (Spain) the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine together with Drew Weissman and Robert Langer for creating two technologies that together promoted messenger RNA therapies, which allowed the rapid development of vaccines such as those of Pfizer and Moderna.
Although her research has saved millions of lives, she is not a hero –assured EFE– are “doctors and people who worked in hospitals. From the cleaners to the nurses, who put their lives at risk in the face of an infectious disease for which there was no vaccine or anything.”
The Hungarian-born biochemist discovered with Weissman how to modify messenger RNA molecules for use as a therapeutic agent. While Lager devised the encapsulation technique with nanoparticles that allows it to be introduced into the body.
The life of Karikó, who was born in 1955, is enough for a book, in fact, he says that in Japan there are already two. In 1985, she emigrated to the United States with her husband, her two-year-old daughter and a thousand dollars hidden in a teddy bear. (in communist times in Hungary you couldn’t get more than a hundred).
The professor at the University of Philadelphia and vice president of BioNTECH, which together with Pfizer developed one of the vaccines for covid, spent decades working on the messenger RNA technique. But nobody believed in it and for years it had no funding, although it did not give up on it.
Karikó, who received the Princess of Asturias Award last year, speaks passionately about his work and curiosity is always present in his life. Perhaps that is why, while they take photos of her, she points to the stained glass windows to highlight her beauty or she bends down to touch and see closely the metal applications of the staircase.
The perspective of Katalín Karikó
Now that there are billions of people vaccinated against covid around the world, can we say that we are out of this?
A: If we only had the original variant from Wuhan (where it originated in China) we would be fully protected, but we will have to generate new vaccines for the different variants if we can’t protect with the original, although it seems that the booster doses with the original vaccine is protecting us.
But with the messenger RNA technique it is easy to make new vaccines if they are needed. We are not going back to the situation of 2020.
A: Now, if someone gets infected they just have a sore throat, they don’t die like they did two years ago, although the unvaccinated may be at risk.
Will we have to get vaccinated every year?
A: We don’t know yet. Experts point out that it is probably necessary to be revaccinated every season as with the flu
You have said that the messenger RNA technique is a biomedical revolution in the making, why is it being investigated now?
A: Vaccine applications are being expanded to viruses for which there are none, such as HIV, cytomegalovirus and respiratory viruses. We are also going to try vaccines for tuberculosis and malaria, and this year a clinical trial will be carried out to find one against herpes.
There are other therapeutic uses, for example BioNTech is studying one for cancer. Before the covid vaccine, it was already being used for heart failure and others are investigating gene therapies for amyloidosis.
With all the difficulties you’ve had to overcome, what do words like failure or resignation mean to you?
A: Being an emigrant in the United States makes you have to go through many difficulties and you don’t give up, you don’t give up easily because you have already given up a lot in order to establish yourself there.
You have to believe in yourself, because when we left we had a thousand dollars and a one-way ticket, you are in it up to your neck and you have to do everything you can to get ahead, you are not a person who gives up easily.
Despite the difficulties, I had a very happy life in the laboratory, I loved to experiment and find out things. It’s a very funny thing.
Is it true that sometimes you spent so much time with it that you slept under the desk in the office?
A: I did it several times at a time when my family was in Philly and I was working out. I was in the library until nine at night and then in the lab. For nine months I slept at friends’ houses or in the office.
Then in Philadelphia with my family, some New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Eve, suddenly something occurred to me and I had to go to the laboratory, I couldn’t start cooking when I had the idea in my head that I was going to achieve something. He was always thinking of new ideas asking me questions, time after time, and that makes you very excited.
What is science for you?
A: It is everything. I like to read publications from the sixties, in which there was less data than now, but much more reflection. I wish I could hug the people who wrote their articles so passionately, even though most of them are already dead.
Few people know the scientists who have made vaccines possible or others who also save lives with their work.
A: Yes, that will have to be changed. People take a pill in the morning that will save their lives and they don’t wonder who invented it. But then there are the Kardashians that everyone knows and you wonder, what have they done and they haven’t done anything.
But now it is changing. At the Madrid airport you see that (the Awards) L’Oreal-Unesco (for women in Science) put my photo and not that of a model.
People don’t ask who has discovered something, but neither you, the journalists, nor we the scientists have communicated it, but we should do something about it.
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