Hero

BioNTech is a wonderful vaccine developed from a brand-new technique. So much so that some of us remain skeptical of the new technology of messenger RNA platform. Consider how we compare with any earlier vaccine - the fastest one was mumps vaccine which took four years to develop - and we are amazed by the way Pfizer-BioNTech was developed within 12 months.

The fact is, we all forget how much longer the scientists have been solving the puzzle of mRNA vaccine. The answer, as it turns out, is more than 15 years. That's what l learned after reading the story of a Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó, who is named one of 2021 "Heroes of the Year" by Time Magazine.

During these years, Karikó has been fascinated by RNA. If DNA makes up the letters of life, RNA creates the words, and ultimately the sentences, as explained by Time. In her pursuit of turning our body into its own drug-making factory, Karikó has been figuring out ways to use messenger RNA to instruct the body to make proteins, enzymes and different molecules. Think about her working late nights and early morning, writing at least one new grant application every morning, being turned down and rejected again and again - at least 24 times. But the key is that she kept pushing, even after being fired by her supervisors at the University of Pennsylvania.

The breakthrough came after her collaboration with an immunologist years later, when they found out the trick of encasing the mRNA inside a fat bubble, thus protecting the precious genetic code without triggering a cascade of inflammatory storm. The next thing they knew, in a lightbulb moment, is the flexibility of creating any vaccine once they get the readout of a virus's genetic sequence. Get the code, build the correspoding mRNA with chemical compoundes, pop it into the fat bubble and that's the birth of a new vaccine. Simple and smart. When this smart solution was first published in the journal Immunity in 2005, the beauty of their findings was clearly not appreciated by the scholars around the world. The night before the paper was published, Karikó was expecting a flood of phones calling to congratulate next morning. No one called. Nothing.

Not until 15 years after the original work of Karikó, when we are now blessed with the protection by BioNTech.