Katalin Karikó is professor at her alma mater, University of Szeged, Hungary, and adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, where she worked for 24 years. She is former senior vice president of BioNTech, Mainz, Germany, where she worked between 2013-2022. For four decades, her research has been focusing on RNA-mediated mechanisms with the goal of developing in vitro-transcribed mRNA for protein therapy.
Katalin Karikó investigated RNA-mediated immune activation and, together with Dr. Drew Weissman, discovered that nucleoside modifications suppress immunogenicity of RNA. This groundbreaking work unlocked the opportunity for the therapeutic use of the mRNA. The nucleoside-modified mRNA-lipid nanoparticle vaccine platform was used to create the FDA-approved Covid-19 mRNA vaccines by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna that was crucial to fight the pandemic.
Katalin Karikó received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of Szeged, Hungary, in 1982. Her thesis work involved synthesis and antiviral evaluation of 2’-5’-linked oligoadenylates, called 2-5A, that is responsible for the interferon-induced antiviral mechanism. She performed her research at the Biological Research Center, Szeged, focusing on 2-5A generated with nucleoside analog, cordycepin.
In 1985, after moving to the Temple University, Philadelphia, she expanded her research on 2-5A molecules modified at their nucleosides and internucleotide linkages. In 1986, she helped to perform a clinical trial run at the Hahnemann University where HIV-infected patients were treated with mismatched double-stranded RNA to induce their antiviral systems. In 1989 she joined the faculty of the Medical School of University of Pennsylvania. There, she used in vitro-transcribed (IVT) mRNA to overexpress selected proteins in cultured cells. She, together with Drew Weissman, demonstrated the IVT mRNA is inflammatory and thus unfit for therapeutic use. They identified uridine being responsible for this activation. Then, they discovered that incorporating pseudouridine into the mRNA, the newly created mRNA, was highly translatable, and avoided activation of RNA sensors in human immune cells.
As the result of this work, she, together with founders of BioNTech, demonstrated functional use of nucleoside-modified mRNA, encoding antibodies targeting cancer and infectious diseases. In animal models of multiple sclerosis, they used autoantigen-encoding mRNA and proved that this novel mRNA technology can be used for induction of tolerization, thus opening the possibility to treat autoimmune diseases.
Katalin Karikó also participated in a clinical study in which tumors of patients were injected with modified mRNAs encoding cytokines, thus promoting potent antitumor immunity and tumor eradication at local and remote sites. She is co-inventor on 22 patents granted by US. She, together with Dr. Weissman, founded RNARx, a company dedicated to developing nucleoside-modified mRNA for therapy.
Karikó is the mother of 2-time Olympic Champion rower Susan Francia.
For her achievement Karikó received many prestigious awards, including the Breakthrough Prize and the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
