The Wilhelm Exner Medals of 2021 could only be awarded in 2022…
Retrospectives
Exner Lectures 2022
Session 1
May 18th, 2022, 9:00 am
Venue: Palais Eschenbach, Eschenbachgasse 11, 1o1o Vienna
Luisa Torsi Exner Medal 2021
Luisa Torsi
The Laureates Lecture
Single-molecule detection with a large-transistor endows a clinician with the attacker advantage
Biomarkers are becoming the preferred highway toward early diagnosis of progressive diseases, such as tumors or neurodegenerative syndromes. When it comes to infective diseases the immunometric direct detection of a pathogen (instead of its DNA) is a faster way, as it requires no sample pretreatment. The possibility of detecting a marker (proteins, genomic strands as well as whole viruses or bacteria) in a peripheral biofluid such as blood or even saliva, makes the process also minimally invasive. The sooner the detection is, the earlier the diagnosis will be, the easier for a clinician is to fight the battle against a disease. Nowadays there is the possibility to detect a single strand of a mutated gene for the early diagnosis of tumours or to detect a single copy of a viral DNA. Still a commercial system that can reliably detect a single-proteins in a sample of 0.1 ml of a real biofluid, is not available.
Prof. Torsi with her group, has pioneered the field of Single-Molecule detection with a large Transistor – SiMoT in 2018. This established back then a world record of protein detection directly in a sample of whole bovine serum. The SiMoT platform is a bioelectronic system capable of detecting a single protein or a genomic marker in 0.1 ml of real, non-pretreated samples of blood or saliva. The system, that is under development also in the framework of a collaborative EU project (https://simbit-h2020.eu) coordinated by Torsi, can be manufactured at low-cost as a handheld device. The prospective is the development of ultra-sensitive, fast (15-20 minutes), low-cost and highly-reliable diagnostic systems for ultra-early screening of progressive diseases such as the tumour (e.g. pancreatic) as well as viral (e.g. SARS-CoV-2) and bacterial(e.g. Xylella fastidiosa) infections. Such a system holds the potential to revolutionize the current approach to point-of-care-testing, plagued with limits in terms of reliability and sensitivity. The future horizon is to get access to ultra-sensitive markers and pathogens detection where it is needed, namely at the doctor office, in a pharmacy or even at the patient’s home or directly in an olive threes field.
Co-Lecturers
Gottfried Strasser, TU Vienna
Herbert Gold, Joanneum Research Graz
Serpil Tekoglu, Johannes Kepler University Linz
Session 2
May 18th, 2022, 1:00 pm
Venue: Palais Eschenbach, Eschenbachgasse 11, 1o1o Vienna
Katalin Karikó Exner Medal 2021
Katalin Karikó
The Laureates Lecture
Developing mRNA for therapy
The idea of creating a vaccine with messenger RNA, or mRNA, the substance that help to convert DNA into proteins, goes back decades. However, early efforts to use synthetic mRNA for treating or preventing various diseases failed due to the inflammatory nature of such mRNA. While working at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Katalin Karikó found that transfer RNAs known to contain many modified nucleosides were non-immunogenic, when delivered into immune cells, thus suggesting that modified nucleosides might suppressing the immunogenicity of the RNA. The seminal work by Karikó and colleagues revealed that one of the four building blocks of RNA, the uridine was responsible for triggering inflammation in mice. Using modified nucleotides, she synthesized protein-encoding long mRNAs containing modified nucleosides, including pseudouridine. She found that mRNA containing pseudouridines were non-inflammatory, didn’t activate the RNA-sensing receptors located in the endosomes of human immune cells. Most importantly, the pseudouridine-containing mRNA translated into the encoded protein very efficiently. They demonstrated that modified mRNA encoding erythropoietin was functional in vivo and increased the hematocrit in mice, opening the potential to use the mRNA for the treatment of anemia and other medical use. Together with her colleagues at the University, they used modified mRNA formulated with LNP as vaccine and protected mice and macaques against a variety of viruses. Nucleoside-modified mRNA were successfully used to create the anti-SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna/NIH, and both approved for human use. The legacy of the Wilhelm Exner award is to honor scientists whose work has demonstrated significant outcomes for the betterment of humankind, for society and businesses. The novel mRNA platform not only accelerate development of new vaccines and other drugs, but makes all the mRNA-based medicine more affordable since using the human body to generate their own medicine.
Co-Lecturers
Guido Wollmann, MedUni Innsbruck
Michael Kundi, MedUni Vienna