Drew Weissman

Drew Weissman shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Katalin Karikó for the nucleoside modification that made messenger RNA usable as a medicine. Born in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1959, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at five, which he has said shaped his interest in medicine. He took a degree at Brandeis and both a medical degree and a doctorate in immunology and microbial pathogenesis at Boston University. He did his fellowship at the National Institutes of Health under Anthony Fauci, working on HIV, and moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 to build a laboratory pursuing an HIV vaccine. There he met Karikó at a photocopier, both queuing for a machine, and they began a collaboration that lasted decades with almost no institutional support. Weissman's contribution was the immunology: he understood why synthetic mRNA provoked such a fierce inflammatory reaction, tracing it to detection by toll-like receptors, which are part of the innate immune system's machinery for recognising foreign genetic material. Their 2005 paper in Immunity showed that substituting pseudouridine for uridine allowed mRNA to slip past those sensors, cutting inflammation and, unexpectedly, increasing protein production by an order of magnitude. Very few people noticed. They struggled to secure funding or a publisher's interest for years afterwards. The chemistry was licensed by BioNTech and Moderna, and became the basis of the COVID-19 vaccines authorised in December 2020, which are estimated to have saved many millions of lives. He continues to work on vaccines for HIV, herpes, malaria and coronaviruses, and on delivery methods for low-income countries where cold storage is impractical.

• Lived: 1959 CE – ?
• Nationality: American
• Roles: immunologist, scientist