On October 2, Beijing time, Sweden’s Karolinska Institute announced that it would award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman in recognition of their discoveries in nucleoside base modifications, which enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. They will share the prize money of SEK 11 million equally.
Winner resume:
Katalin Karikó, female, was born in Szolnok, Hungary in 1955. She received her PhD from the University of Szeged in 1982 and conducted postdoctoral research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences until 1985. She subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at Temple University in Philadelphia and Bethesda University of Health Sciences. In 1989, she was appointed assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she served until 2013. She then became vice president and later senior vice president of BioNTechRNA Pharmaceuticals. Since 2021, she has been a professor at the University of Szeged and an adjunct professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Drew Weissman, male, was born in Lexington, Massachusetts, USA in 1959. He received his MD degree from Boston University in 1987. He received clinical training at Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and conducted postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. In 1997, Weisman established his research group at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is director of the RNA Innovation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. His work has contributed to the development of effective messenger RNA vaccines, most notably the development of the COVID-19 vaccines produced by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna.