Interview with the 2023 Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine Drew Weissman on 6 December 2023 during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

What brought you to science?

Drew Weissman: It’s a great question. I’m 64 years old, so there might’ve been when I was five and I just don’t remember anymore. Probably one of the big things. When I was five years old, I was diagnosed with type one diabetes, and back then the life expectancy of kids wasn’t a full life. My parents knew that, I learned about that later. I’m not sure that being a diabetic influenced me into science. I was always interested in engineering and science growing up. So maybe.

How important were your parents to your scientific career?

Drew Weissman: We’ve always been a close family. And they sparked education, and they wanted us to get education and to get as much education as we wanted. I don’t think they cared if it was in science, math, physics, engineering, I think they cared about just getting a good education.

What do you enjoy most about science?

Drew Weissman: I think it’s really searching the unknown, trying to understand things that we don’t understand, and trying to be able to figure out how things work. My family tells jokes, when I was a little kid, I used to take everything apart to understand how it worked. We never had a toaster that worked, and the doorknobs rarely ever worked because I was always taking everything apart to try and understand how things work. I’m still that way now with science and immunology and RNA, but it’s really just the curiosity to understand how things work, how they really work.

Have you had mentors who have influenced your career?

Drew Weissman: There have been a few and at different stages of my career there were different people who were mentors, who were teachers. Early on it was Jerry Fasman at Brandeis University, who gave me my first research job and taught me how to think about research. After that, it was Ann Marshak, who I did my PhD with, who taught me critical thinking and how to read and understand the literature and how to formulate ideas into practice. After that, it was probably Tony Fauci when I worked in his lab, who gave me the freedom to investigate whatever I wanted. He was interested in HIV, I started on a whole new topic in his lab because I thought it would be interesting, and I thought it was important, and he both gave me that freedom, but helped me think about it to create interesting ideas.

Do you see any similarities between sports and science?

Drew Weissman: I think it was more it prepared me, because I’m told I was a hyperactive kid. Back then, they didn’t treat hyperactive kids, they just let them run around the house and bounce off of walls. But I used sports and martial arts as a way of controlling my thinking and controlling my activity and being able to focus. I think those are really critical to be a good scientist, because if you’re bouncing off of walls, you can’t formulate ideas, you can’t test new hypotheses, and that helped me overcome that, that hyperactivity.

How did you celebrate the news of your Nobel Prize?

Drew Weissman: It was kind of a funny interaction. I got a message from Katie Karikó at four in the morning that said, ‘Did Tom call?’ Katie has a habit of sending cryptic notes that I don’t understand, and I texted her back, ‘Tom, who?’ Then I called her and, and we talked at four in the morning, and she said, Well, you know, Tom from the Nobel Foundation called and said that we won the award, but he also said, could I give him your phone number? Because he had a bad phone number for me. And we said, you know, This sounds like a joke. I think some, some anti-vaxxer is playing around with us, this is all a joke, and we didn’t believe it. Then Tom finally called around 05:15 in the morning, and I started to believe it, but I still wasn’t sure. I waited until the video on the internet around six, and then I believed it.

My older daughter had just returned from her honeymoon Sunday evening, had not been to sleep yet, and I called her at six in the morning and said, I won the Nobel Prize. She hopped on a train and took the train up to Philadelphia to be with us. My younger daughter … We kept trying to locate and leave messages for her and find she wouldn’t answer her phone, she wouldn’t answer anything. We called her friends who told them to go over to wake her up. She finally answered the phone, she goes, Why the hell are you waking me up so early in the morning? and hung up the phone, so we didn’t see her until dinner time. My children had a very different way of celebrating the award.

Tell us about your co-laureate Katalin Karikó and your collaboration.

Drew Weissman: You’ll hear about this when I present my gift to the museum. The lore is that Katie and I met over a Xerox machine. I have to explain to young people what a Xerox machine is, because they don’t exist anymore, but back then, the only way you could read a scientific paper is if you photocopied it. We both read a lot, and we would both fight over the copy machine, and we started talking. Katie, as she says, she likes to brag about what she does, and she talked about making RNA and I said, Well, that’s interesting, I work on dendritic cells and I’m interested in trying RNA on them. So it’s, I joke, it’s like the old Reese’s commercial, the chocolate and peanut butter coming together and making a great candy bar. That’s what our meeting at the Xerox machine was like.

Katie was very outgoing, very aggressive, very forceful in what she believed in. I’m a quiet guy, I’m happy just working in the background, not being in the limelight, not being in front of audiences, and Katie enjoys being in front of the audience and running the show. The other Nobel laureates, we were at the House of Sweden, and Katie and I were sitting down and Katie was directing everything, and they turned to me and they said, Oh, we understand how your relationship goes now. It was kind of humorous.

How important is collaboration in science?

Drew Weissman: To me, that’s really the critical thing in science. Right now my lab collaborates with about 250 labs around the world, in every continent except Antarctica. We haven’t found any scientists in Antarctica to collaborate with, to make it all, but we’re close, just about every country in the world. I spend a lot of time just going and visiting collaborators to work on projects, to help understand model systems and diseases. All of our work is really done through collaboration, it’s incredibly critical.

How important is equity in science?

Drew Weissman: It brings you into my other interest in my career, which is equity, and which is making sure the same science and the same medicines are available across the world. I’ve had a lab in Thailand for about 30 years, and I’ve had a lab in Botswana for about 25 years. The chief purpose of both of those was involving local scientists, teaching them about vaccines, about RNA, about different therapeutics that we develop, and then getting them to set up their own labs and set up their own infrastructure. With Thailand, we built a GMP production site. What that means is anything you give to people, any drug, any vaccine, has to be produced under GMP production capabilities, which is very expensive, very highly monitored situations, so we built a GMP site in Thailand. After that, I’ve built 17 more across the world in South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, across Eastern Europe – really across the world. We’ve got one right now, operating in the Ukraine, which I’m amazed about. I can’t wait to visit, to actually see how they’re running a GMP site in the middle of a war, but they are.

What advice would you like to share with young scientists?

Drew Weissman: I think young scientists have to think about a lot of things, and I spend a lot of time talking to junior high school and high school students, because I think by the time they get to college, if they don’t want to be a scientist, it’s too late to convince them. You have to start very early and maybe even elementary school, just stimulating their knowledge of science, but I think that’s when you have to get to kids and you have to present to them what science is, what it involves. I did an experiment with a Nobel group yesterday where we made purified DNA from strawberries. That will be a video for young kids to learn about science, and I think those sort of things – just to stimulate interest – not every kid is going be a scientist, I don’t expect that to happen. But any kid that’s curious, that wants to understand things, that’s interested in biology or chemistry or physics or math, I think those kids should consider science as a field to go into. It’s incredibly rewarding, it’s a ton of work, it’s not like going into your father’s business and taking over and having everything laid out for you. It’s a lot of work to set up to establish yourself to become acclimated and, and successful. But the rewards are enormous.

How can we encourage diversity in science?

Drew Weissman: My usual answer to that is I’m a scientist, I’m not a sociologist. I don’t know how you encourage that. The way I do it is I work with teachers because teachers understand their students and teachers know how to influence, to get messages to their students. I’m working with the experts who know what they’re doing. I’m happy to say what I need to say to get people interested, but I think we really have to go with the teachers.

How have you managed to cultivate your curiosity?

Drew Weissman: I’m sure some of it was genetic because my father is similar. He was an engineer and then decided to start his own business in a completely different field of engineering, and he learned, and he developed and he invented. I think a lot of it is genetic.

How does it feel to know that your research has saved millions of lives?

Drew Weissman: I still … It hasn’t sunk in. My view … I’m a physician researcher. I got an MD and a PhD, and my interest starting when I was young was always … I had hoped to someday develop some treatment that would make people better. I think I’ve accomplished that. The number to me is I guess, less important. It’s fantastic that it has helped millions of people. I think in the future, it’s going help a lot more because there’s so much potential that can be done with RNA therapeutics between gene therapy, between therapeutics, protein deliveries, it’s just enormous what can be done. And to me, that’s what I’m looking forward to.

What are some future uses of your mRNA research?

Drew Weissman: I think gene therapy is probably the most important future use. Right now, there are thousands and thousands of genetic diseases. The main way they’re treated is symptomatic. You try to make people better, you give them drugs that make the disease a little better. Most people still die of their genetic disease at young ages. The hope for the future is going to be gene therapy, where you fix the broken gene. The problem with that is there are a few gene therapies. There’s one for sickle cell that’s being approved right now, it costs 1-4 million dollars per person, and sickle cell – 300,000 people a year born with the disease, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa – they don’t have facilities to do gene therapy. They don’t have a million dollars a person to afford gene therapy. So, what we’re doing is we’re developing what we call in vivo gene therapy.

Instead of taking cells out of a patient, infecting them with viruses, screwing around with them in culture and then giving them back, we’re trying to do everything in the body. The only thing our treatment will be is an injection of RNA LNPs. You give one injection, it goes to the bone marrow, it fixes the broken gene, and it cures the disease. If we can do that for sickle cell, there are thousands of other bone marrow genetic diseases that can be done. It’s already been done once for liver diseases, for an amyloidosis, for a company that I work with that gives a single injection of RNA LNPs, and it fixes the genetic disease. It cures the patient so far. To me, that’s the future of gene therapy, because if you can’t use it around the world, great, you save a few people in the US and Europe. But what about everybody else?

What makes you most passionate right now with your research?

Drew Weissman: It is like asking a parent which of their children they like better. You can’t really answer that. Or I can’t, I’m passionate about everything that I do. We’re working on vaccines for peanut allergies, and if you’ve ever had a child patient, their lives are nightmares. There’s no really good treatment for that. We are working on vaccines for autoimmune diseases, so no longer will we people be on Methotrexate or Anti-TNF Antibodies, they’ll have specific therapies that won’t suppress their immune systems. We’re working on vaccines for cancer, both to prevent cancer and to treat cancer. We’ve got our variety of gene therapies. We’ve got a big program in HIV cure. The problem with HIV is that once HIV infects somebody, it becomes latently infected in their cells, never goes away.

They predicted 70 years it would take for the virus to disappear on retroviral therapy. We’re working on PNA LNP based therapies that will cure the disease. It’ll cut the virus out of the latent reservoirs and clear it away. We’re working on vaccines to prevent HIV, so someday we’ll be able to both prevent it and cure people that have the disease. We’re working on therapeutics. People nowadays develop heart disease, is the number one killer in the world. We really don’t have great therapeutics. You can operate on somebody and fix the coronary vessels. You can put stents in, they help with the symptomatology. They extend people’s lives, but they don’t last forever. There are many other heart diseases that we have almost no therapies for. We figured out how to target cardiomyocytes, the muscle cells in the heart, so now we can deliver gene editing technology, we can deliver therapeutic proteins, we can do the same for the lung, for the brain, for kidneys, for the immune system. The potential is just enormous.

How do you like to spend your free time?

Drew Weissman: Unfortunately, over the past six or seven years, my spare time disappeared, so I really don’t have anymore. When I was younger, and my wife would joke about this, when I would get frustrated at research, I would come home and build something. Build a porch onto the house or renovate a bathroom or renovate a kitchen. I stopped doing that because I just didn’t have time anymore. In the summer, I enjoy the water. I enjoy kayaking and being out on the water.

Watch the interview

Did you find any typos in this text? We would appreciate your assistance in identifying any errors and to let us know. Thank you for taking the time to report the errors by sending us an e-mail.