COVID research: Masks, Vaccines, Social Distancing, Treatments

[RTH10260]

Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for research enabling mRNA COVID-19 vaccines

Posted 1h ago1 hours ago, updated 55m ago

Scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, from Hungary and the United States respectively, have received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries enabling the development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

Key points:

• Dr Katalin Karikó and Dr Drew Weissman identified a way to alter messenger RNA to enable its safe introduction to cells
  Their 2005 research enabled the future development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, administered to billions during the pandemic
  The recipients of the remaining five Nobel Prizes for 2023 will be announced over the coming days

The prize, among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is selected by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden's Karolinska Institute medical university, and also comes with 11 million Swedish crowns (about $1.56 million).

"The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19," the body said.

"The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times."

Nobel Assembly secretary Thomas Perlman said both scientists were "overwhelmed" by news of the prize when he contacted them shortly before the announcement.

Dr Karikó was senior vice-president and head of RNA protein replacement at BioNTech until 2022, and has since acted as an adviser to the company.

She is also a professor at the University of Szeged in Hungary, and adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine.

Dr Weissman is professor in vaccine research at the Perelman School.




https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-02/ ... /102926620

[Slim Cognito]

How long before trump demands he be given their prize because everybody knows he created the Covid vaccine and in record time!

[Sam the Centipede]

How long before trump demands he be given their prize because everybody knows he created the Covid vaccine and in record time!

And he admits it was difficult, even for someone as intelligent as him: "Person, woman, disease, virus, vaccine"

[AndyinPA]

https://apnews.com/article/covid19-paxl ... 3bd6d749ef

WASHINGTON (AP) — The COVID-19 treatments millions of Americans have taken for free from the federal government will enter the private market next week with a hefty price tag.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is setting the price for a five-day treatment of Paxlovid at $1,390, but Americans can still access the pills at no cost -- for now. The less commonly used COVID-19 treatment Lagevrio, manufactured by Merck, also will hit the market next week.

Millions of free, taxpayer-funded courses of the pills will remain at pharmacies, hospitals and doctor’s offices across the country, U.S. Health and Human Services officials said Friday. People on private insurance may start to notice copays for the treatments once their pharmacy or doctor’s office runs out of the COVID-19 treatments they received from the government.

No surprise here, but .

[Sam the Centipede]

Apparently "immunological imprinting" or "antigenic original sin" might be an issue going forward and perhaps now for SARS-CoV-2.

When you are first infected with a virus or receive a vaccine your adaptive immune system develops antibodies to that virus and stores a memory. If you are exposed to the same virus, your immune system recognizes it and mounts a rapid response.

This happens for each novel virus or vaccine you encounter.

But what happens when you encounter a different variant or strain of a virus that your immune system has seen before, either via infection or vaccination?

If the novel variant is close enough to the first variant, the immune system will mount a rapid response tuned to the first variant. It probably won't create a new memory or adjust its existing response. So the imperfectly adapted response might not work well.

For vaccines, this can mean that the new vaccine is ignored by the immune system: seen it already, blap!

This memory persists for years: it has been observed with flu where elderly people have mounted rapid effective responses to strains similar to ones they experienced decades before, using the old antibodies.

What can be done? This is not a newly discovered phenomenon; it has been known for over half a century. It's one of those "trust the scientists" things. Remember how people were screeching (in Europe, I don't know about other continents) because the first booster in the very first vaccination campaign was pushed back to 13 weeks rather than the previously scheduled 4 or 5? That was introduced to prioritize getting first doses into as many vulnerable arms as possible, but the public struggled to understand that a booster at 13 weeks builds better long term protection than a booster at 4.

Perhaps adding adjuvants* might help. Or longer intervals between jabs. I don't know. But some clever people in white coats will work it out!

I was prompted to write this by reading Gertrude Rey's blog post Virology Blog: The Problem of Original Antigenic Sin and a lot of the above comes from that, except enny errers that I might have introduced.

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* For those who have forgotten: an adjuvant is a chemical added to a vaccine to provoke a stronger immune response, think of it as an irritant. Not all vaccines need them. Without an adjuvant, the immune system might not misidentify (think about it!) the vaccine as a threat worthy of a response. We don't want the immune system to say "oh, that vaccine isn't doing my body any harm, I'll ignore it."