AI in our Cells?

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman received the Nobel Prize in Medicine today. This is the incredible story of how they infused our cells with an innovative kind of artificial intelligence.

It all starts with DNA, which I think of as the book of recipes for making humans. Synthetic mRNA elevates the recipes at mass scale with the use of artificial intervention.

To benefit from a recipe book, you need a cook who can read the instructions and follow it faithfully to reproduce a delectable dish. The book is the blueprint and the cook is the agent. In our cells, the RNA is the agent, the conduit between the recipes (instructions) and the creation of different types of cells (the dish).

RNA reads the DNA and with the help of messenger RNA (mRNA) and transfer RNA (tRNA), it tells the cells what proteins to create and how.

Pfizer and Moderna’a COVID vaccines injected synthetic mRNA into our cells. Synthetic meaning the instruction is not derived from DNA. This mRNA vaccine made our cells produce a protein that looks like the coronavirus. It was not the real thing but it tricked the immune system into producing antibodies against the intruder.

Synthetic mRNA is like someone standing over our shoulder altering the recipe because they know that the tweak can produce a new dish that will be amazing. You change the recipe without offering resistance because that person is a great cook. In the same way, the body quietly accepts the altered mRNA and does its bidding.

Extend the use of synthetic mRNA and you have a whole new way of fighting a wide array of diseases and reversing the ravages of malformed DNA and new pathogens.

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman are behind the magic of synthetic mRNA. The duo have now entered the history books with their Nobel win.

Karikó is a Hungarian scientist who slaved over the belief that synthetic mRNA has ground-breaking potential. At UPenn she bore a decade of grant rejections and the scorn of her peers. When synthetic mRNA was injected into cells, her experiments caused the subjects to sense a foreign object and create a massive overreaction, an unfettered war of sorts. This compromised her experiments.

In the subsequent years, she was demoted and left the university but continued collaborating with her colleague, Drew Weissman. Together they tweaked one of the nucleotides in the synthetic mRNA to control the unexpected immune reaction. They called this "swapping of a misaligned tire". The tweak caused the synthetic mRNA to sneak into the body without the war.

In 2005, Karikó and Weissman began publishing their discovery. By 2007 Derek Rossi, a recent Stanford graduate and a Harvard professor picked up on the potential of synthetic mRNA to alter embryonic stem cells which would provide endless possibilities for disease management.

Rossi connected with venture capitalists in the Cambridge area at the same time as a Turkish couple - Ugur Sahin and ?zlem Türeci - in Germany started BioNTech based on Karikó and Weissman's research. Rossi's associations led to the creation of Moderna and BioNTech collaborated with Pfizer. This led to the delivery of the mRNA vaccines.

Karikó and Weissman's Nobel prize is a testament to the endless and thankless toil that alters the course of human existence - in this case work that altered the course of a global pandemic and will continue to impact the future of medicine in significant ways.

Kudos to Karikó for having faith, tenacity and courage to alter our molecular recipe with a new kind of artificial intelligence and hat tip to the Nobel Committee for recognizing this work in the lifetime of these stalwarts.