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“I’m an RNA scientist,” I said. I can do anything with RNA,'” Dr. Karikó recalls to Dr. Weissman. He asked him: Can you make an HIV vaccine?
“Oh yes, oh yes, I can,” Dr. Kariko aforementioned.
Up until this point, commercial vaccines carried modified viruses or parts of them into the body to train the immune system to attack invading microbes. An mRNA vaccine instead carries instructions – encoded in the mRNA – to allow the body’s cells to pump their own viral proteins. Dr. Weissman thought this approach would better mimic a real infection and provide a stronger immune response than conventional vaccines.
It was an extreme idea that few scientists thought would work. A molecule as fragile as mRNA didn’t seem like a possible vaccine candidate. Grant commentators were also unaffected. His lab had to work with the seed money the university gave new faculty to get started.
Until then, it was easy to synthesize mRNA in the lab to encode any protein. Dr. Weissman and Karikó inserted mRNA molecules into human cells growing in petri dishes, and, as expected, the mRNA instructed the cells to make specific proteins. But when they injected the mice with mRNA, the animals got sick.
Dr. “Their fur grew up, they hunched over, they stopped eating, they stopped running,” Weissman said. “No one knew why.”
He studied the workings of binary mRNA for seven years. Countless experiments have failed. They wandered through dead-end streets, one after another. Their problem was that the immune system saw the mRNA as part of an invading pathogen and attacked it, making the animals sick while destroying the mRNA.
They finally solved the mystery. The researchers discovered that cells retain their own mRNA with a particular chemical modification. So the scientists tried making the same change to mRNA that was made in the lab before injecting it into cells. It worked: the mRNA was taken up by the cells without evoking an immune response.
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