PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Drew Weissman was the last one in his family to get the COVID-19 vaccine. That’s only funny because he’s the co-inventor of the mRNA technology used in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
“I put my wife and daughter into the Phase 3 clinical trials so they’d been immunized months earlier, and they were just looking at me saying, ‘When are you going to get your shot so we can all go out again?’ ” he said in an interview with KYW Newsradio, reflecting on 2021.
This year has been a whirlwind for Weissman and his research partner, Kati Karinko, a Jenkintown resident who is now a vice president at Biontech, Pfizer’s vaccine partner.
They toiled in anonymity for more than 20 years in their lab at the University of Pennsylvania, believing in the potential of mRNA to induce immunity to the flu, HIV and other common viruses.
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Weissman said they never imagined a pandemic like COVID-19.
“I’m actually sorry that it had to come to the rescue of a pandemic like this, that’s killed so many people and done so much harm to the society of the entire world,” he said.
Their work demonstrates the importance of patient, consistent scientific research. Vaccines can take a decade or more to develop, but because Weissman and Kariko pursued — and Penn funded — research when it was still theoretical, the COVID-19 vaccine became available in less than a year. They watched the technology go from the lab to millions of arms, likely saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
They are still learning as they go. They now know a booster is needed and will find out if a shot may be needed every year. They anticipated variants and can tweak the vaccine to adjust to them, but Weissman believes a pan-coronavirus, which would protect against all variants identified so far, is a better approach, and that is in development.
“We get phone calls from [NIH Director] Tony Fauci every so often saying, ‘Hurry up with that vaccine,’ ” he noted.
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Weissman’s major concern, though, is making sure developing countries have equal access to the vaccine.
“It’s great that the U.S. and Europe are vaccinated. The problem is that this virus isn’t going away until the world is vaccinated,” he said. “Variants are going to keep coming, and it’s going to be a struggle.”
Weissman’s team is working on vaccine production sites in Southeast Asia as well as several regions of Africa and Eastern Europe.
“We’re working to build vaccine production sites that’ll be controlled by the local countries so they can make their own vaccine and give it to their people, and I think that’s critical to stopping this and the next pandemic and anything in the future,” he added.
Weissman also expects Phase 1 clinical trials, postponed by COVID-19, to soon begin on the viruses he and Kariko long targeted, including HIV and influenza.
Listen to more about Weissman’s research in the player below.