Attachment

hlan did it for the Together Karikó and Weissman kept pursuing the idea of creating vaccines using mRNA that had been engineered in a lab. But they still had to get more mRNA past the cell's defense systems, a problem that other scientists helped solve. In 1999, a cancer researcher named Pieter Cullis and his colleagues proposed that lipids--basically, tiny bits of fat--could be used to encase and protect a more delicate molecule, such as mRNA.11 Six years later, working with Cullis, biochemist Ian MacLachlan did it for the first time. The lipid nanoparticles he developed paved the way for the first mRNA vaccines.12 As late as 2010, hardly anyone in the federal government or private industry was interested in trying to make vaccines using mRNA. Major pharmaceutical companies had tried and failed, and some scientists felt that mRNA would never trigger enough of a response in the body. But an official at DARPA, the little-known research program for the U.S. military, saw enough promise in the technology that he started funding mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases.* As pioneering as this work was, it didn't lead immediately to new vaccines. Accomplishing that would be the task of companies dedicated to translating the breakthrough into a product that could be approved and sold; the U.S.-based Moderna and Germany-based Curevac and BioNTech were founded to do just that. In 2014, Karikó joined BioNTech, where she turned her attention to developing an mRNA vaccine for flu. * DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the DARPA official is a cancer researcher named Dan Wattendorf. He now works at the Gates Foundation.