Kariko, Weissman win Nobel medicine prize for COVID mRNA vaccine work

Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman won this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine on Monday for their work leading to the development of messenger RNA vaccines for COVID-19, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute said, Kyodo reports. 

Kariko, an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Weissman, director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovations, discovered a therapeutic technology based on the modification of a molecule called messenger RNA, or mRNA.

The method led U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. and its German partner BioNTech SE to jointly develop the mRNA vaccine in 2020, contributing greatly to combating the global pandemic.