ROME, July 10 — The story of messenger RNA vaccines begins not in a pandemic, but in a laboratory mouse. In 1990, researchers at the University of Wisconsin injected mRNA into mice and watched it produce protein. It was a first glimpse of what the technology could do — but the road from that early demonstration to the arms of millions of people took more than three decades.
For families who have lost loved ones to COVID-19, or for patients now hoping mRNA might one day treat their cancer, the timeline matters. The science behind these vaccines did not emerge overnight.
It was built, step by careful step, by researchers who refused to give up on an idea that many in the scientific establishment had dismissed.
The breakthrough that changed everything
The real turning point came in 2005. That year, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania published a discovery that would later earn them the Nobel Prize. They found that modifying mRNA with a molecule called pseudouridine could dramatically reduce the inflammatory responses that had made earlier attempts at mRNA therapy dangerous.
Their work, published in 2005 and again in 2008, solved the fundamental problem that had kept mRNA from becoming a viable medical tool. The body’s immune system had been treating synthetic mRNA as an invader.
Karikó and Weissman found a way to make it invisible. The Nobel committee recognized this in 2023, awarding Karikó and Weissman the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. For those who followed the science closely, it was a long-overdue acknowledgment of work that had once seemed destined for obscurity.
From academic discovery to global enterprise
Two companies saw the potential early. BioNTech was founded in 2008, based in Mainz, Germany. Moderna was founded in 2010, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Both set out to develop mRNA therapeutics — treatments that could instruct the body’s own cells to produce proteins that fight disease. For years, the work continued quietly.
The technology was being tested against various targets, but no mRNA product had ever reached the market. Then came 2020. When the novel coronavirus began spreading around the world, both companies moved with extraordinary speed.
Pfizer partnered with BioNTech on a vaccine called BNT162b2. Moderna developed its own, mRNA-1273.
Clinical trials followed, and the results were striking. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine showed 95 percent efficacy. Moderna’s showed 94.1 percent.
By 2023, more than 13 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines had been administered globally. In Western countries, mRNA vaccines accounted for the majority of shots given. The technology that had first been demonstrated in mice in 1990 had become the backbone of the world’s pandemic response.
What comes next
The same platform that proved effective against COVID-19 is now being researched for other diseases. Scientists are studying mRNA vaccines for influenza, HIV, Zika, and cancer. For cancer patients, the promise is particularly personal: mRNA vaccines could potentially be tailored to train a person’s immune system to attack their specific tumor.
The research is ongoing. No mRNA vaccine for these other diseases has yet been approved.
But the infrastructure is in place, the manufacturing capacity exists, and the scientific community now has decades of accumulated knowledge to build on. What began with a single injection into a mouse has become a platform that may transform how medicine approaches infectious disease and oncology. For the families waiting for better treatments, that is not an abstraction.
It is the reason the long, slow work of basic science matters.
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