Drew Weissman

From Grokipedia

Drew Weissman (born September 7, 1959) is an American immunologist and physician-scientist renowned for co-developing the nucleoside-modified messenger RNA (mRNA) platform that overcame innate immune recognition barriers, enabling the production of stable, non-inflammatory mRNA vaccines and therapeutics. He serves as the Roberts Family Professor of Vaccine Research in the Department of Medicine and as director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Weissman received his MD and PhD degrees from Boston University in 1987, followed by clinical training in internal medicine and infectious diseases. In collaboration with Katalin Karikó, his foundational research demonstrated that incorporating modified nucleosides such as pseudouridine into mRNA prevents activation of toll-like receptors and other immune sensors that trigger inflammatory responses, thereby allowing mRNA to instruct cells to produce antigens without toxicity—a breakthrough that underpinned the rapid deployment of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. For these discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled effective mRNA vaccines, Weissman and Karikó were jointly awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In brief

Drew Weissman grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, in a Jewish family that treated science as practical hope. He trained as a physician-immunologist and took on messenger RNA, a molecule the body treated like an alarm.

With Katalin Karikó at Penn he showed that modified nucleosides could quiet that alarm. For years the work sat in the category of elegant and maybe later. Later arrived in 2020. The same chemistry underpinned the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Karikó, reminded the decade that its most famous medical story had a long preface. Weissman talks about the next uses: flu, HIV, cancer, a platform rather than a single shot.

Jewish medical history in America is full of people who treated a plague as solvable. Weissman belongs beside Salk and Sabin, with a different molecule and the same ethic: the body can be taught if you listen to why it refuses the first lesson.