Vaccine scientists are TIME's 2021 Heroes of the Year. In science there is hardly ever a simple quick fix, but this was truly a moment of the right fix. A brand new kind of vaccine technology at exactly the right time TIMEPOY
—came from more established methods, modified with impressive speed to fight a new virus. Still, Corbett, Graham, Kariko and Weissman achieved a breakthrough of singular importance, introducing an innovative and highly effective vaccine platform, based on mRNA, that will impact our health and well-being far beyond this pandemic.
Katalin Kariko grew up the daughter of a butcher in a small town in Hungary, living under Communist rule in the 1950s and ’60s. The family had electricity, but not running water or a refrigerator. Watching her father at his job, the young Kariko became fascinated with figuring out how living things work. That took her to undergraduate studies in biology at the University of Szeged, where she first learned about RNA. It would become her obsession through her biochemistry Ph.D.
Things finally changed for Kariko in 1997, thanks to a casual office conversation by the copy machine. An immunologist and physician named Drew Weissman had just joined Penn to start a lab focused on developing a vaccine against HIV and other diseases. He and Kariko shared a habit of photocopying articles out of recent scientific journals from the research library. By the machine, they discussed their respective approaches to vaccine development.
It would take another 15 years—and the emergence of the devastating SARS-CoV-2 virus—before the global science community would finally grasp the importance of their discoveries. In the meantime, some scientists were gradually starting to build the case for the promise of mRNA, including, co-founders of a German company called BioNTech. In 2013, Kariko joined the company to head its mRNA program, focused at the time on cancer vaccines.
In 2014, to put the discoveries of Graham’s team to the test, the VRC began collaborating with Moderna, a small biotech company based in Massachusetts. In July 2019, Graham and his team published early results showing that a vaccine built on Moderna’s mRNA platform and containing their modified RSV protein boosted the immune response in people by more than tenfold over previous RSV vaccines.
On Jan. 10, Chinese scientists published the sequence of the new virus, and the team got to work. “Dr. Graham and I had discussed exactly how we would maneuver in that moment, so once the sequence came out, we knew exactly what we would do,” says Corbett. “We knew where to make the mutations in the spike protein [to stabilize it] and we knew the type of platform we would like to make the vaccine with, which was the mRNA platform with Moderna. So we really had a plan.
Kariko was celebrating her daughter’s birthday with her husband when she got the call from Sahin, BioNTech’s CEO. He asked if she was alone, so she walked to another room, then celebrated in the same understated way that characterized her entire scientific career—with her favorite treat, a box of Goobers.
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