Two Authors in Pharmaceutics Awarded the Physiology or Medicine Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 was recently awarded to Prof. Dr. Katalin Karikó and Prof. Dr. Drew Weissman for their discoveries regarding nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, saving millions of lives worldwide.

The laureates found that the chemical conversion of uridine, a nucleotide of mRNA, to pseudouridine, appeared to prevent the body from perceiving the mRNA as an intruder and destroying it, a finding reported in a 2005 seminal paper. Without the unwanted immune response, mRNA can infiltrate the cells to carry out its intended function and provide cells with plans for making proteins.

Two years ago, Pharmaceutics (ISSN: 1999-4923) released a Special Issue “mRNA Therapeutics: A Themed Issue in Honor of Professor Katalin Karikó”, featuring ten articles published between August 2021 and February 2022. Prof. Dr. Karikó and her team at the biotech company, BioNTech, published an article for this Special Issue titled “Ribozyme Assays to Quantify the Capping Efficiency of In Vitro-Transcribed mRNA”.

Prof. Dr. Weissman, in collaboration with colleagues at Pennsylvania University and George Mason University, published an article titled “Screening Libraries to Discover Molecular Design Principles for the Targeted Delivery of mRNA with One-Component Ionizable Amphiphilic Janus Dendrimers Derived from Plant Phenolic Acids” that appeared in the Special Issue “Dendrimers: A Themed Issue in Honor of Professor Donald A. Tomalia on the Occasion of His 85th Birthday for His Outstanding Achievements in Advancing the Field of Dendrimers”.

We offer our congratulations to this year's recipients of the Physiology or Medicine Nobel Prize!