BREAKING NEWS: Hungarian Karikó awarded Nobel Prize in medicine – UPDATE

Hungarian-born biochemist Katalin Karikó and American physician-scientist Drew Weissman have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Phisiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19, the secretary of the Nobel Assembly announced in Stockholm on Monday.

The Nobel Prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish krona (EUR 952,000). The award ceremony is traditionally held on Dec. 10, the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel.

Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam, a member of the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, said Kariko and Weissman’s work had been crucial in saving lives in the early stages of the pandemic.

“The impressive flexibility and speed with which mRNA vaccines can be developed pave the way for using the new platform also for vaccines against other infectious diseases,”

the Nobel Assembly said in its press release. “In the future, the technology may also be used to deliver therapeutic proteins and treat some cancer types.”

Speaking to journalists in Szeged, where she earned her doctorate in 1983, Kariko said what mattered most was to find joy in work. Karikó said her message to young students was that it was important for them to maintain their physical and mental health and to handle stress.

Karikó, a research professor at Szeged University (SZTE), said her advice to young people was to become better and better in their field through enjoyment in their work. She cited Hungarian-born scientist Hans Selye, one of the world’s most influential stress researchers, as saying that focus should be put on what can be changed.

Answering a question, Karikó recalled that her mother had listened to the Nobel Prize announcements each year, hoping that her daughter’s name would be read out, even though there were times when she was just “busy in the lab” without a job or a research group.

Karikó was born in Szolnok, in eastern Hungary, and graduated from the University of Szeged with a degree in biology. She obtained a PhD at the Szeged Biological Research Centre in 1983 before continuing her career as a biochemist in the United States.

She began working with Drew Weissman in 1998, and the two filed their patent for the use of nucleoside-modified mRNA in 2005.

From 2006 to 2013, Karikó was CEO of RNARx, a company she co-founded with Weissman.

In 2013, she went to work for BioNTech with her Japanese research partner Hiromi Muramatsu. She soon became the company’s vice president, going on to oversee the development of BioNTech and Pfizer’s mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine in 2020.

Karikó has received several Hungarian and international awards, including the Széchenyi Prize, the Ignaz Semmelweis Prize, the Reichstein Medal and the Grande Medaille of the French Academy of Sciences.