Profile of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman: 2023 Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine

Abstract

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karik and Drew Weissman "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19".The use of their discovery for the development of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines has saved millions of lives (1, 2) and technologies based on their discovery will likely lead to the advancement of many additional promising vaccines and therapeutics.This marks only the second time a Nobel Prize was awarded for vaccines, after Max Theiler received the award in 1951 for the yellow fever vaccine.The Food and Drug Administration approval of the mRNA/ lipid nanoparticle (LNP) vaccine for COVID-19 was extraordinarily speedy.SARS-CoV-2 causing the disease appeared at the beginning of 2020 and the first emergency use authorization (EUA) was granted on 11 December 2020.This rapid development was largely made possible by the generous and continuous support of basic research by the US government over many years.The Trump administration started a publicprivate partnership for the development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines on 15 May 2020, with an initial $ 10 billion funding for warp-speed (ref. 1) (3).The name was inspired by the terminology for faster-than-light travel in Star Trek.While it took less than 12 months to get the first EUA, hard work over decades by many investigators led to this major breakthrough for medicine and the world.What were the fundamental scientific contributions made by Katalin Karik and Drew Weissman, which made this major breakthrough possible?Biochemistry: Katalin Karik was born in 1955 in Hungary, which was at that time a satellite state of the Soviet Union.Despite growing up under relatively poor circumstances, Karik excelled in science early on, received her PhD in biochemistry in 1982 from the University of Szeged, and then continued as postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Bio chemistry, Biological Research Center of Hungary.During that time she already worked on lipids and liposomemediated DNA transfer (4), a prescient choice for what would be important for her scientific direction in the future.In 1985, Karik left Hungary and joined the laboratory of Robert J. Suhadolnik at Temple University in Philadelphia where she stayed until 1988, working on DNA transfer into mammalian cells and RNA biology (5-10).After a brief stint at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, she moved to the University of Pennsylvania to work on mRNA with Elliot Barnathan.During this time, she discovered her passion for mRNA-based therapy.While struggling to get

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