This feature story in the national newspaper Aftenposten reflects on the story behind the success of mRNA vaccines, and on the importance of continued global research collaboration and close connections between academic research and pharmaceutical industry.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine was this year given to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. In November, Özlem Türeci, that together with Uğur Şahin founded Biontech – one of the companies behind the mRNA vaccines that was developed against Covid-19, and where Katalin Karikó was employed, recently visited the Institute for Cancer Research and PRIMA.
Türeci gave two lectures in Oslo. One at the Radiumhospital showing promising results of combining mRNA vaccines with cancer cell therapy. The other lecture was given at Vitenskapsakademiet and described the history behind project “Lightspeed” that was launched Jan 12 2020, the day the sequence of the sars-cov-2-virus was published. The lecture is available here.
Read the full story in Aftenposten (Norwegian only)