DIVERSITY IN STEM: JOURNEY TO THE COVID-19 VACCINE

By Areeha Khalid Emory Kim

From the credit of Rosalind Franklin’s work on DNA structure going to James Watson and Francis Crick to the extraction of Henrietta Lacks’ “immortal” HeLa cells without her knowledge or consent, women and minorities have been historically exploited without credit to their role in advancing scientific research. Yet, their contributions have been vital to the progression of medical technology as the COVID-19 pandemic has clearly demonstrated.

The Technology behInD The VaccInes

The leading COVID-19 vaccines used today in the U.S. are the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, both of which are mRNA vaccines based on the work of Dr. Katalin Kariko, a sixty-six year-old scientist and Hungarian immigrant to the U.S. Dr. Kariko, who has been working with mRNA since 1989, was inspired by the idea of designing and injecting mRNA into a cell, thereby inducing that cell to make any protein of her choosing. Her work was novel at a time when the mRNA field barely existed, causing it to remain overlooked. A field barely existed, causing it to remain overlooked.

Throughout her career, Dr. Kariko bounced between universities and labs, unable to receive grants or tenured positions for her work and never earning more than $60,000 in a year. After finding herself again without a lab or funds for research in 1997, Dr. Kariko met Dr. Drew Weissman at the University of Pennsylvania. During a quick conversation over the copy machine, she convinced him to let her join his lab to work on a vaccine for HIV. Beginning in 2005, Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman discovered that adding a molecule called pseudouridine to mRNA allowed it to be able to alter cellular function without eliciting an attack by an individual’s immune system. This technology was eventually picked up by BioNTech (which partnered with Pfizer) in Germany and Moderna in the U.S. for work on coronavirus vaccines.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Dr. Kariko’s methods were used by both companies to target a “spike protein” located on the COVID-19 vaccine surface. The first successful results of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine came back on November 8, 2020, and Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman received the vaccination just a few weeks later on December 18th. Without Dr. Kariko’s lifelong devotion to mRNA research in the face of repeated lack of support from the universities she was a part of, the development of the COVID-19 vaccine may have taken much longer, costing countless human lives in the process.

The makIng of The VaccInes

Moreover, Dr. Kariko’s work is not the only example of women and minorities in STEM coming together to combat the COVID19 pandemic. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were developed using Dr. Kariko’s technology by teams of diverse scientists.

Dr. Ugur Sahin and Dr. Özlem Türeci, a pair of Turkish immigrants to Germany, are physicians, scientists, and the founders of BioNTech, the company behind the Pfizer vaccine. Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci are a married couple who began their work on mRNA nearly twenty years ago in search of novel therapies to treat cancer by targeting specific antigens located in tumor cells. In 2018, Dr. Sahin spoke at a conference in Berlin about how he believed mRNA technology could be vital in case of a global pandemic. Just two years later, BioNTech and

Pfizer partnered to do just that - with Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci’s team developing twenty potential candidates for the COVID-19 vaccine by March 2020, and the clinical trials for the selected version coming back with a 95% success rate in November.

Much like the U.S., immigration continues to be a subject of heated debate in Germany, with far-right groups strictly in opposition. Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci’s success has prompted a call for globalization and removing the barriers for STEM research and careers. Like Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a Black woman and immunologist at National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Maryland, is sparking conversations about diversity and inclusivity in medical research due to her work on the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. Dr. Corbett, who is just thirty-four, worked with a team of scientists to develop and complete Phase I clinical trials for the Moderna vaccine in just ten months. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH, put it, "The vaccine you are going to be taking was developed by an African American woman and that is just a fact.”

Even with the Moderna vaccine completed and being administered to thousands daily, Dr. Corbett’s work has not finished. She continues to support marginalized communities by spreading awareness on the safety and importance of getting vaccinated, especially to those most at risk by the pandemic: Black, Native American, and Latino communities.

The high risks in these communities are supported by statistics. For example, the CDC reports that 46% of Black adults in the U.S., as opposed to 30% of white adults, do not wish to get the COVID-19 vaccine. This is due to fear of side effects due to the speed with which it was developed, and a general distrust of the healthcare system due to a longstanding history of exploitative medical practices, such as the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study.

To combat these health disparities, Dr. Corbett actively uses her Twitter account, @KizzyPhD, and speaks at events targeting communities of color in accessible locations, such as at churches. Her philosophy is to teach science in a digestible way that is understandable to her audience. In her words, “Churches often need to have something scientifically broken down for them by someone who also believes in God.”

Through her thorough explana-

Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett Dr. Katalin

Kariko

Dr. UGUR SAHIN Dr. Ozlem Tureci

tions of the way the vaccine works and why people should get vaccinated, Dr. Corbett is taking the first step in stopping the history of gatekeeping scientific knowledge from the general public through inaccessibility and unnecessarily complicated jargon.

DIVersITy In sTem: a goal for a posTpanDemIc WorlD

Dr. Kariko, Dr. Sahin, Dr. Türeci, and Dr. Corbett are trailblazers in both the fight to stop the spread of COVID-19 and the fight to make spaces for minorities in healthcare and medical research. The stories of these scientists are powerful examples of the outcomes of a lifetime’s worth of dedicated research despite working within a system not designed for people like them to succeed, and a vision to the way the world should be.

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