Among the scientists we have to thank for the COVID vaccines that transformed the pandemic is one person who played a central role in the development of RNA-based vaccines, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett.
Dr. Corbett grew up near Chapel Hill in Hillsborough, worked in a UNC lab for a summer in high school, and then moved back and forth between North Carolina and the DC/Baltimore area as a researcher: she was a student in the famous Meyerhoff Scholars Program at UMBC, then did her PhD at Carolina, and then moved to the National Institutes of Health.
At the NIH, Corbett was scientific lead of the Vaccine Research Center's COVID-19 team that developed mRNA-based vaccines by making use of the Cryo-EM structure and her and colleague's previous work on MERS virus to design an mRNA vaccine rapidly. Corbett and colleagues discovered that the mRNA vaccines worked in mice and in primates, leading to the now-famous Moderna and Pfizer vaccines that have transformed the pandemic.
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| December 2020: The efficacy of the Moderna (see p. 30) and Pfizer (see p. 58) mRNA vaccines was shockingly good! Whew! |
Now she's a professor at Harvard, running a lab that studies vaccines and the immune system, to inform the development of new vaccines including (fingers crossed) a vaccine that might work against all SARS-COV-2 variants. She's active on Twitter, which has given people an almost-live, inside view of what must be a fascinating path.
Here's a general-interest interview with then-NIH chief Francis Collins...
... and I recommend especially another interview that spans from her initial interest in science to some more in-depth virology: