Drew Weissman: "We believe that in the next six or seven years we will have an effective vaccine against HIV"

In Bilbao's Casco Viejo, where for months the crews had to stop txikiteo due to the pandemic, no one stops Drew Weissman (Lexington, Massachusetts, 62 years old) to ask him for a selfie.

It is probable, however, that if they recognized him, those Bilbao people who love close socializing and open mouths, famous for their somewhat boastful generosity, would start a popular collection to dedicate a statue to him in one of the seven downtown streets.

Weissman, a circumspect-looking man, is one of the scientists who allowed us to recover a large part of life taken away by covid, who calmed the fear of the most vulnerable and relieved ucis and morgues.

His work together with the researcher Katalin Karikó at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) made therapies based on messenger RNA possible.

Vaccines from Pfizer or Moderna incorporate it and would not exist without the vision of it.

RNA is an essential molecule for life.

It enters the nucleus of the cells, reads the instructions written in the DNA and part with them so that the factories of the organism produce everything necessary to exist.

In the 1990s, Karikó raised the idea of ​​using this messenger to heal the sick.

If the right bit of RNA were introduced into his cells, he speculated, they would produce the missing protein that causes anemia or mount an immune response against infection or even cancer.

Weissman wanted to make better vaccines, and he also sensed that the answer might lie in the fragile molecule.

The solution did not seem feasible, among other things, because the RNA injections provoked an intolerable immune response.

That changed starting in the early 2000s, when Weissman and Karikó began chatting by a photocopier in their apartment where they copied journal articles that informed them of the latest scientific findings.

Together, they discovered a modification in the RNA sequence that suppressed inflammation and facilitated the production of the protein in large quantities.

In a 2005 article, they published the results of a revolution that their colleagues were slow to assimilate.

For this decades-long effort and its enormous impact on millions of lives, Weissman is in the Biscayan capital this week to receive today the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine together with Karikó and Robert Langer, a chemical engineer who created the system to encapsulate the RNA so that it can be injected.

“We are preparing a universal vaccine to prevent future pandemics”

Ask.

His work has had a huge impact on the lives of many people and has made him famous, what has this celebrity meant to you?

Response.

It's actually a bit awkward, because I'm very shy and I'm happy when they let me work alone.

Now I'm in the limelight, I see my photos posted around New York and it's disturbing.

But it is positive to be able to reach many people, talk to them about science, explain to them what RNA vaccines are, why they are safe and why they should be given them.

Q.

The scientific community was slow to perceive the importance of what you and Karikó published in 2005. Is this inevitable when it comes to great innovations or can something be done to accelerate the acceptance of new discoveries by society and scientists? ?

A.

I don't think there is a solution.

When we published our article in 2005, we thought that everyone would want to use our discovery to make RNA therapies, but they weren't interested and we didn't understand why.

It took five more years for the interest to come.

This is life.

Drew Weissman, during the interview.

Javier Hernandez

Q.

The pandemic has accelerated the development of vaccines and RNA therapies.

What would have happened if it hadn't happened?

R.

We were already starting to test vaccines in people before covid, but now everything is going faster and an atmosphere favorable to the use of RNA has been created throughout the world.

Regulatory agencies are keen to approve vaccines and therapeutics, and RNA has become a household term.

P.

Now, there is talk of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, and not Karikó's or Weissman's or any other of the researchers who made them possible.

Do you think the merits and benefits of new drugs are fairly shared between big pharma and basic researchers?

R.

We must focus on supporting basic science and governments have to finance it better.

What people don't understand is that almost every drug that's developed, every new therapy, is made in academic labs.

Pharmaceutical companies don't.

The companies go to the laboratories and say: this is a great drug, we want to develop it.

That said, I don't want my name on a vaccine.

Q.

Before working on this type of vaccine, you dedicated yourself to studying HIV.

Almost 40 years after its discovery there is no vaccine, but for the coronavirus it was achieved in a few months.

Why?

A.

We have been working on HIV vaccines for many years and now we have some clinical trials with RNA vaccines and we believe that in the next 6 or 7 years we will have an effective HIV vaccine.

People have to understand that some vaccines are easier than others; the covid one is easy and the HIV one is very difficult.

They are not the same.

But we are working on vaccines for HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and many other diseases, and the probability of success in those projects has increased with the success of those for covid.

“New medicines come from academic laboratories, not from pharmaceutical companies”

Q.

What other vaccines and therapies can we expect thanks to new technologies that use RNA?

R.

For example, with CAR-T, one of the latest therapies for cancer [is to extract the patient's own immune cells, modify them so that they detect tumor cells and inject them again].

They have been very successful, but are difficult to produce.

You need two weeks of work in the laboratory and they cost almost half a million dollars.

With RNA, we've been able to modify two types of immune cells inside mice and make these CAR-Ts to cure them of cardiac fibrosis.

And we're bringing it to humans.

We believe that we will be able to cure sickle cell anemia with a single injection of RNA, and it is important, because every year 200,000 people are born with this disease, mainly in Africa and India, and now, to cure it, you need treatments with cell therapies that cost a million dollars.

Q.

Are we better prepared for the next pandemic thanks to this new type of vaccine?

R.

On the one hand, we are preparing a universal vaccine for coronaviruses and other viruses that have the potential to jump from animals to humans and thus prevent future pandemics.

We're doing the same thing with the flu.

We are also making vaccines for malaria, which is one of the great scourges of humanity, and for viruses such as Ebola or Nipah.

I believe that RNA is going to allow us to produce new vaccines very quickly, effectively and safely for the next possible pandemics, and also avoid having to have souvenir punctures every few months.

Q.

You talk about producing RNA vaccines against tuberculosis, HIV and malaria.

They are three of the diseases that kill the most in the world, but they mainly affect poor countries.

With covid we have seen that vaccines arrived very quickly in developed countries, but the same has not happened in the poor.

A.

I've been working on this my entire career.

For example, with labs in Thailand, we started developing a vaccine in the spring of 2020. We've also set up a GMP-compliant production facility so they can produce vaccines for humans, and it's already working.

The Thai vaccine is in the final phase of clinical trials and will soon be available throughout Southeast Asia.

In South Africa we have also set up another GMP laboratory that is allowing local production of the vaccine.

And when covid is over, they will be able to start producing vaccines against malaria.

And in Thailand they will start with vaccines for dengue or other diseases that are specific to the region and that pharmaceutical companies have no interest in producing.

P.

In your application for cancer, will it also be possible to think of universal treatments to a certain extent or is the disease too complex to think of that possibility?

R.

Indeed, it is an incredibly complex disease.

People tended to believe that all breast cancers were the same, which is not the case.

Therefore, it is very difficult to make an effective vaccine for everyone.

But we are working on it and I hope that in the future we will have something.

I believe that cancer vaccines will be one of many therapies in development that may change cancer prognosis.

Q.

Besides cancer or infectious diseases, what other therapies can be developed from RNA technology?

R.

Vaccines are being worked on for autoimmune diseases such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, for food or environmental allergies... RNA is going to be used in more and more therapies.

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