Weissman is developing a pan-coronavirus vaccine

Person: Drew Weissman
Lived: b. 1959
Field: Immunology
From: American

The story

For Drew Weissman, the COVID-19 vaccines were a beginning rather than an end. As director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation, the inaugural Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research and a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, he leads work to extend mRNA technology to many other diseases.

His laboratory is developing pan-coronavirus vaccines that could protect against a broad family of coronaviruses, including ones that have not yet emerged. Other projects use mRNA to deliver gene-editing tools, including technology to enable genes that produce missing antibodies, and to develop treatments for acute inflammatory conditions. Weissman has said he hopes mRNA can be used to create vaccines against influenza, herpes and HIV.

HIV has been a goal since the start of his career. As a fellow in Anthony Fauci's group at the National Institutes of Health, he studied how HIV-1 interacts with receptors on immune cells, and his first experiments with Katalin Karikó at Penn were aimed at an HIV vaccine. The approach has since proved its flexibility: in 2017 his colleague Norbert Pardi and Weissman reported promising results for a modified-mRNA vaccine against the Zika virus in animals, and the Lasker Foundation notes that his lab is working on mRNA vaccines for influenza, HIV and a pan-coronavirus target.

The Nobel committee observed that the flexibility and speed of mRNA vaccine development open the way to vaccines against other infectious diseases and, in future, to delivering therapeutic proteins and treating some types of cancer. Because a new mRNA vaccine needs only a new genetic sequence rather than large-scale cell culture, it can be designed and produced far faster than traditional vaccines.

Weissman also works to spread the technology, collaborating with researchers in low- and middle-income countries such as Thailand so that they can develop and manufacture mRNA vaccines themselves. If the next generation of mRNA vaccines succeeds, the world could be ready for the next pandemic far sooner than it was for COVID-19.