Specialty: Biochemistry
Major Contributions:
Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Medicine (shared)
Senior Vice-President at BioNTech
Adjunct Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania
Image: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Spending most of her career working with mRNA to create new types of vaccines wasn’t always the easiest road for Dr. Katalin Karikó – until 2020 when the research she and Dr. Drew Weismann developed was used to create the first vaccines for COVID-19.
A native of Hungary, Kari, as she is known, excelled at her education there earning a BSc degree in biology and her PhD in biochemistry from the University of Szeged. Working for a few years at the Biological Research Center of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences it was in 1985, when the lab lost its funding, that she moved to the United States to work as a post-doctoral fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Moving to the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, she continued the work she started in her graduate school years – delving deep into RNA – more specifically mRNA, which is genetic material that tells your body how to make proteins. Because of her tenuous employment situation at Penn, other scientists would go to bat for her and find lab space and funding for her to continue to work.
A chance meeting at a photocopy machine in 1997 led to ongoing collaboration with Dr. Drew Weissman, a newly arrived professor of immunology. In the early 2000s the pair made their biggest breakthrough – finding a way to modify mRNA to deliver instructions to cells for the creation of antigens to protect against diseases without the body having an immediate immune detection and reaction.
This technology means that modified mRNA could be used in a wide array of future vaccines and treatments – including the vaccines developed for combating the COVID-19 virus in 2020. Ever the researcher Dr. Karikó wasn’t sitting back waiting for the results of the vaccines trials to come in. She and her team were already working on new pan-coronavirus vaccines, sickle cell anemia gene therapy, and vaccines for peanut allergies just to name a few. Weissman and Karikó shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
After all her struggles to be able to do the science that she loved she stated in an interview “My dream was always that we develop something in the lab that helps people, I’ve satisfied my life’s dream.”
Written by Angela Goad
Sources:
Nobel Prize: Katalin Karikó Facts
National Inventors Hall of Fame: Katalin Karikó
Nobel Prize Winners Dr. Katalin Karikó and Dr. Drew Weissman | The Story Behind mRNA Vaccines
Long Overlooked, Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus
See Also:
Katalin Karikó, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023: Official Interview