Katalin Karikó and the innovation issue

Over the past many months, important honours and prizes have been coming to biochemist Katalin Karikó. In the scientific world, she is almost a rock star.

If you are wondering who she is that’s all right because scientists rarely grab the headlines. Karikó though is slowly becoming something of a media sensation because the spotlight is finally coming to rest on those who are really helping to fight the worst pandemic in 100 years. Thus, the 66-year-old scientist has been eulogised by the New York Times as the one who “helped shield the world from the Coronavirus”.

Since the beginning of 2021, more than a dozen awards have been given to Karikó for groundbreaking research on using messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA, to fight diseases. But the recognition has been long in coming.

For the woman who emigrated to the US from her native Hungary in the 1980s, it has been a struggle all the way. As an untenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), her career was tenuous as she pursued her obsessive mRNA research.

She was always transferring from one laboratory to another, dependent on one senior scientist or the other who shared her passion to take her in when she was a lowly research assistant professor. Back then, it was early days for mRNA research and grants were hard to come by. In fact, in 1995, when she was all set to become a full professor at Penn University, she was demoted because she could not raise funds.

While she was sleeping under the desk in her lab because the commute was too long and working weekends, her family calculated that she was earning just $1 an hour, given that she never earned more than $5,000 a month. But she was convinced that mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own medicines, including vaccines.

It was only in 1997 when she teamed up with Drew Weissman, a professor of immunology at Penn, that she made the breakthrough. The two scientists, who share most of the awards, created a hybrid mRNA that could sneak its way into cells without alerting the body’s immune system and send it into overdrive.

It is this technology that is being used by Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna Inc, the top manufacturers of vaccines to prevent the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The potential for applying this technology across the board for vaccines and medicines is staggering, according to some scientists.

When Big Pharma launches a relentless campaign against the waiver of intellectual property rights (IPR) sought by over a 100 countries at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to ensure vaccine equity as the world battles a deadly pandemic, you wonder at its gall. They contend that without patents there would be no incentive to innovate, specially in the medical field.

Pfizer Chief Execuive Albert Bourla describes the idea of putting IPR on hold till the pandemic ends as “nonsense” and even “dangerous”, we understand it is the greed for profits that prompts such claims. Pfizer revenue in 2021 from its COVID-19 vaccine alone is set to be over $33 billion.

Karikó, along with Drew, holds two patents on the mRNA breakthrough. Reports say licensing it has earned her $3 million. But if you were to ask her if it was patents that drove her relentlessly to solve the mRNA riddle, she would in all likelihood say “that is nonsense”.

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