Nobel prize winner Katalin Karikó is now focusing on a disease without a cure

I have no idea if anything about this can be found in English-language media but thought I'd share anyway. Katalin Karikó is one of the researchers (the other being Drew Weissman) who have just received the Nobel Prize for the development of the mRNA covid vaccines. She gave an interview in Hungarian yesterday, where she also talked about her current work.

She says she is working on a disease that currently has "no solution at all". She says she believes she may understand it based on all the knowledge she has gained (presumably while working on the mRNA vaccines). She says this is why she left BioNTech last year.

She also says she doesn't want to say which disease it is as when she did so in the past with other diseases, people with the disease got super excited. She doesn't want to give false hope and she will say something when she actually has something to say about it.

This can literally be any poorly understood disease and she gave no indication that it is long covid or similar. I just thought it was interesting and decided to put it out here. I doubt it is anything about "post-vaccination syndrome" because I remember from another recent interview that she was kind of dismissive about health issues attributed to the vaccine (apart from the well-known ones).

This is a Hungarian-language video: https://rtl.hu/hirado/2023/10/03/kariko-katalin-nobel-dij-kutatas-tervek

 

How exciting. I took an online class on the mRNA vaccine from Penn University a while ago and regarding the future of this technology, they wondered if a combination of mRNA vaccines and CRISPR could become a cure for cystic fibrosis one day.

 

Nature had a related article yesterday:
mRNA COVID vaccines saved lives and won a Nobel - what1s next for the technology?

quote:

Where the technology could really make a difference is with pathogens that drug firms haven’t been able to crack. One is cytomegalovirus (CMV), a virus that has eluded vaccine developers for more than 50 years and that causes birth defects in infants, as well as potentially deadly infections in people with compromised immune systems.

...

The future of mRNA vaccines is not only limited to infectious disease. “The next big thing is cancer, for sure,” says Derrick Rossi, interim chief executive at the New York Stem Cell Foundation in New York City and a co-founder of Moderna.

...

As researchers develop improved ways to target mRNA to desired locations in the body, the potential genome-editing applications will expand, says Lior Zangi, who studies mRNA therapeutics for heart regeneration at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. “There’s a real possibility that this will lead to many new drugs for many different diseases,” he says. “That will be the real future.”

 

Btw, just as a "fun fact":

She said this here: https://www.elsevier.com/connect/ar...ure-treatments-q-and-a-with-2-biotech-leaders

Later, between 1985 and 1988, while working at Temple University in Philadelphia, I participated in a clinical trial in which patients with AIDS, hematological diseases and chronic fatigue were treated with dsRNA. The molecular mechanism of interferon induction by dsRNA was not known, but the antiviral and antineoplastic effects of interferon were well documented.​

I couldn't find the actual study (at least one with her name) but based on the fact that this happened in the late 80s in the US and that she also published a trial of Ampligen for AIDS at this time together with William Carter, the Ampligen guy, I assume that chronic fatigue here meant CFS after the Lake Tahoe outbreak. Interesting.

 

Yes, I searched yesterday for the paper on PubMed and Google Scholar without success

 

Is this it? https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(87)90543-5.pdf

 

This is the Ampligen trial they did with William Carter but this one only seems to be about HIV.

 

Karikó was in Robert Suhadolnik's lab at Temple from '85-'88 and Suhadolnik was involved in CFS research for quite a while. Here's a paper from him on a trial of Ampligen in CFS, though it seems to be a few years later (don't have access to the actual paper).

 

Wikipedia thinks so too. "Between 1985 and 1988, Karikó served as a postdoctoral fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia. Karikó participated in a clinical trial in which patients with AIDS, hematologic diseases, and chronic fatigue syndrome were treated with double-stranded RNA (dsRNA)"