Katalin Karikó

Katalin Karikó is a biochemist, professor at University of Szeged, Hungary. She is a former vice president at BioNTech. Prior to that she worked at University of Pennsylvania for 24 years. For 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 inflammatory nature of RNA, which widened the therapeutic potentials of mRNA. Her research on modified messenger RNA is used to create the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna. For her achievement she shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.