Katalin Karikó

Katalin "Kati" Karikó (born 17 January 1955) is a Hungarian-American biochemist focused on RNA-based mechanisms, especially lab-made messenger RNA for protein replacement therapy. She overcame deep skepticism and major hurdles to lay the foundation for mRNA vaccines. In 2023, she shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with American immunologist Drew Weissman.

Karikó co-founded RNARx and served as its CEO from 2006 to 2013. She worked at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals from 2013 to 2022, starting as a vice president and becoming senior vice president in 2019. She left BioNTech in 2022 to focus more on research. In 2021, the University of Szeged in Hungary gave her an honorary doctorate, and she later became a professor there. Although she was also linked to the University of Pennsylvania—which would profit from her eventual discovery—the school actively discouraged her mRNA work by underfunding and deprioritizing it. After being demoted in 1995, she never received tenure, and the university declined to reinstate her, leading her to join BioNTech in 2013.

Her research on RNA-triggered immune responses led to the co-discovery with Weissman of nucleoside modifications that make RNA less immunogenic, a key advance for therapeutic mRNA. Together, they hold U.S. patents for non-immunogenic, nucleoside-modified RNA. BioNTech and Moderna licensed this technology for protein replacement therapies and later for their COVID-19 vaccines.

The mRNA technology Karikó helped create, used in the highly effective BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, was crucial in fighting the SARS-CoV-2 virus worldwide and containing the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides the Nobel, Karikó and Weissman have won many other awards, including the Lasker–DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, Time Magazine’s Hero of the Year 2021, and the Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science in 2022.

**Early life and education**

Karikó was born in Szolnok and grew up in Kisújszállás, Hungary, in a small home without running water, a refrigerator, or television. Her father János was a butcher, her mother a bookkeeper. Her father was punished for taking part in the 1956 revolt. She excelled in science early on, placing third in Hungary in a biology competition. A 2024 University of Szeged retrospective notes that her early passion for chemistry and biology, nurtured through academic competitions where she achieved top national rankings by eighth grade, was a key influence on her later mRNA breakthroughs.

She earned a BSc in biology in 1978 and a PhD in biochemistry in 1982, both from the University of Szeged. She worked with Jenő Tomasz and did postdoctoral research at the Biological Research Centre (BRC) in Hungary. From 1978 to 1985, she was listed as an intelligence asset by the Communist Hungarian secret police, something she says she was blackmailed into out of fear for her career or her father’s safety. She claims she provided no information and was not an active agent.

In 1985, her BRC lab lost funding, so she looked for work abroad. After a research offer from Robert J. Suhadolnik at Temple University, she left Hungary with her husband and two-year-old daughter, carrying the daughter’s teddy bear stuffed with £900 from selling their car and exchanging currency on the black market.

**Career**

From 1985 to 1988, Karikó was a postdoctoral fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia. She took part in a clinical trial treating AIDS, hematologic diseases, and chronic fatigue syndrome patients with double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). This was groundbreaking because the molecular mechanism of interferon induction by dsRNA was unknown, though interferons’ antiviral and antineoplastic effects were well known.

In 1988, she accepted a job at Johns Hopkins University without telling Suhadolnik first, as recounted in Gregory Zuckerman’s 2021 book *A Shot to Save the World*. Suhadolnik threatened to have her deported and reported her to U.S. immigration authorities, claiming she was in the country illegally. While she fought the resulting extradition order, Johns Hopkins withdrew the job offer. Suhadolnik continued to bad-mouth her, making it impossible to find another position until she met a researcher at Bethesda Naval Hospital who had his own difficult history with Suhadolnik. Karikó later confirmed the incident but stressed she was always grateful to Suhadolnik for the opportunity to work in his lab and thanked him for the science she learned. From 1988 to 1989, she worked at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, studying signal protein interferons.

In 1989, she was hired by the University of Pennsylvania.