Abington resident, biochemist Katalin Karikó wins Nobel Prize

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October 2nd, 2023 | By Ryan Genova

Katalin Karikó, an Abington resident, biochemist, and RNA researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named a Nobel Prize laureate in the Physiology or Medicine category.

Karikó shares the award with her research partner, Drew Weissman, for their discoveries that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

“The discoveries by the two Nobel Prize laureates were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020,” Nobel Prize officials said in a statement. “Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”


NobelPrize.org’s press release can be found below:

press-medicineprize2023-3Download


To listen to her reaction to the news, you can listen to the recording below:

The award’s official announcement:

From Nobel Prize’s Facebook post:

2023 Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine Katalin Karikó was born in 1955 in Szolnok, Hungary.

She received her PhD from Szeged University in 1982 and performed postdoctoral research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged until 1985. Karikó then conducted postdoctoral research at Temple University, Philadelphia, and the University of Health Science, Bethesda.

In 1989, she was appointed assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she remained until 2013. After that, she became vice president and later senior vice president at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals. Since 2021, she has been a professor at Szeged University and an adjunct professor at Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

In mid-September, Karikó was honored with a Bayh-Dole Coalition American Innovation Award. For more on her career, you can read Penn Medicine’s biography here.

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Photo: Penn Medicine