Katalin Karikó

Katalin Karikó is a professor at University of Szeged and adjunct professor at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for 24 years. She is the former Senior Vice President of BioNTech SE where she worked between 2013 and 2022. She received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of Szeged, Hungary in 1982.
For four decades, her research has been focusing on RNA-mediated mechanisms with the goal of developing in vitro-transcribed mRNA for protein therapy. She investigated RNA-mediated immune activation and co-discovered that nucleoside modifications suppress immunogenicity of RNA, which widened the therapeutic potentials of mRNA.
Her patents, co-invented with Drew Weissman for application of non-immunogenic, nucleoside-modified RNA for vaccines and therapies were used to create the FDA-approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna. For her achievement Karikó received many prestigious awards, including the Japan Prize, the Horwitz Prize, the Paul Ehrlich Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Keio Prize, the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Kovalenko Medal, the Tang Prize, the Warren Alpert Prize, the BBVA Award, the Harvey Prize, the Breakthrough Prize, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.