Two female scientists have won King Faisal Prize for Medicine and Science laureates for 2023.
The awardees at the 45th session of the King Faisal Prize are Professor Sarah Gilbert, a Covid-19 vaccine developer and Professor Jackie Yi-Ru Ying, a nanotechnology scientist.
Prof. Sarah Gilbert, the Saïd Chair of Vaccinology in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford University, is the brain behind Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. She was selected to receive King Faisal Prize in medicine.
Prof. Gilbert co-created the vaccine which has been in use in more than 180 countries saving billions of lives due to its efficiency, low cost and accessibility.
According to a GlobeNewswire report, the vaccine is called “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19” and was achieved in 10 months of work using a novel approach. Instead of the traditional vaccine method which uses a weakened or killed form of the initial infection and requires a long time to develop in the human body, Gilbert genetically modified a weakened version of a common virus which caused a cold in chimpanzees to be injected in humans without causing an infection.
Her innovative vaccine technologies used lately for COVID-19 were also applied by her to Malaria, Ebola, Influenza, and MERS, with clinical trials of the latter taking place in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia.
The patented ChAdOx1 technology was said to have been developed by Dr Gilbert and other researchers at the University of Oxford in 2012, while in 2014 she led the first trial of an Ebola vaccine after a large outbreak of the disease in West Africa.
“It was because of the ChAdOx1 technology and her accumulated research that the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine was produced so quickly,” Globe Newswire reported.
Professor Jackie Yi-Ru Ying is the second female winner of the King Faisal Prize in science. She is a Senior Fellow and Director at NanoBio Lab, Agency for Science, Technology, and Research.
Yi-Ru Ying was said to have been chosen for her work on synthesising various advanced nanomaterials and systems, and their applications in catalysis, energy conversion, and biomedicine.
According to the news agency, her inventions have been used to solve challenges in different fields of medicine, chemistry, and energy. Her development of stimuli-responsive polymeric nanoparticles led to a technology which can autoregulate the release of insulin, depending on the blood glucose levels in diabetic patients without the need for external blood glucose monitoring.
Dr Ying’s laboratory has pioneered the synthesis of mesoporous and microporous transition metal oxides; a class of nanomaterials used in energy storage and conversion, by supramolecular templating (organizing or assembling entities).
According to the report, she has more than 180 primary patents and patent applications; 32 of which have been licensed to multinational and start-up companies for a range of applications in nanomedicine, drug delivery, cell and tissue engineering, medical implants, biosensors, medical devices, and others.
Others who were also announced King Faisal Prize laureates for having enriched humanity with key and invaluable achievements and discoveries in the fields of Medicine, Science, Arabic Language & Literature, Islamic Studies, and Serving Islam included Professor Dan Barouch, the Director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (who developed another COVID-19 viral vector vaccine; the Johnson & Johnson vaccine); Professor Chad Mirkin, the Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN), known for invention of spherical nucleic acids (SNAs).
Others were Professor Abdelfattah Kilito who was announced the laureate for the Arabic Language and Literature prize; Professor Robert Hillenbrand, Honorary Professorial Fellow in the department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (IMES) at the University of Edinburgh who received “Islamic Studies” prize in “Islamic Architecture”; Professor Choi Young Kil-Hamed, Service to Islam Prize, and Shaikh Nasser bin Abdullah Al Zaabi, also Service to Islam Prize.
