Hungarian and US scientists win Nobel Prize 2023 in Medicine for anti-Covid vaccine. Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman have been given the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition of their work on nucleoside base modifications, which paved the way for the creation of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
The two Nobel Prize winners’ discoveries were essential for creating COVID-19 mRNA vaccines that worked during the pandemic that started in early 2020.
The laureates played a role in the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times with their ground-breaking discoveries, which have fundamentally altered our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.
Hungary’s Szolnok is where Katalin Karikó was born in 1955. In 1982, she graduated with a PhD from the University of Szeged, and from 1982 to 1985, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged.
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At Temple University in Philadelphia and the University of Health Science in Bethesda, she later carried out postdoctoral research.
She was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, and she stayed there until 2013. She then rose through the ranks at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals to the positions of vice president and senior vice president.
She has held these positions since 2021: Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and Professor at Szeged University.
As Hungarian and US scientists win Nobel Prize 2023 in Medicine for anti-Covid vaccine, the United States’ Drew Weissman was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1959. In 1987, he graduated with his MD and PhD from Boston University.
He completed his postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health after completing his clinical training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre at Harvard Medical School.
Weissman started his research team in 1997 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.
He is the Director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovations and the Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research.
