Katalin
Karikó

Four Decades to an Overnight Breakthrough

Katalin Karikó was born on 17 January 1955 in Szolnok, Hungary, and grew up in the small town of Kisúj­szállás in a one-room home without running water, a refrigerator or a television until she was ten. Her father, János, was a butcher who lost his position after participating in the 1956 Hungarian uprising; her mother, Jánosné, was a bookkeeper. Karikó earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biology in 1978 and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1982, both from the University of Szeged, followed by postdoctoral research at the Biological Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

In 1985, when her Hungarian laboratory lost its funding, Karikó emigrated to the United States with her husband, Béla Francia, and their two-year-old daughter, Susan — smuggling the proceeds of their car sale, sewn into the child’s teddy bear, past Hungary’s strict currency-export limits. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Temple University from 1985 to 1988, then joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, working in its Department of Neurosurgery on the therapeutic potential of messenger RNA (mRNA) — an idea most of the scientific community dismissed as impractical. Grant applications were repeatedly rejected, and in 1995 she was demoted from her track toward a full professorship. She continued the research regardless.

In 1998, Karikó met immunologist Drew Weissman at Penn, and the two began a research partnership that would define both their careers. In 2005 they published a seminal paper showing that modifying mRNA’s nucleosides — replacing uridine with pseudouridine — allowed synthetic mRNA to evade the immune system’s defensive response, a discovery that made mRNA viable as a medical therapy for the first time. In 2006 they co-founded RNARx to develop and patent the technology; Karikó holds 14 US patents from this body of work. From 2013 to 2022 she served as Vice President, then Senior Vice President, of BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals in Mainz, Germany.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, the nucleoside-modified mRNA platform Karikó and Weissman had spent decades developing became the technical foundation of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, both authorised within a year of the virus’s genetic sequence being shared — an unprecedented pace for vaccine development. In 2023, Karikó and Weissman were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.” She donated more than half a million dollars of her prize money to her alma mater, the University of Szeged, to fund RNA research for the next generation of scientists. She is married to Béla Francia; their daughter, Susan Francia, is a two-time Olympic gold medallist rower for the United States (Beijing 2008, London 2012).

Career Milestones