Katalin Karikó and Dr. Drew Weissman won the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine for their work on mRNA vaccines.
The 2023 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to two scientists who developed the messenger RNA vaccine technology used in the first effective shots against COVID-19.
Katalin Karikó, a professor at the University of Szeged in Hungary and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), and Dr. Drew Weissman, director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovations, will share the 11 million Swedish krona ($1.02 million) prize.
The duo’s work led to messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines that do not generate an unwanted immune response, enabling the shots to enter the body without causing severe inflammation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said in a statement on Monday (Oct. 2). The COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are both built on the mRNA research developed by the scientists.
“mRNA vaccines, together with other COVID-19 vaccines, have been administered over 13 billion times,” Rickard Sandberg, a member of the Nobel committee for physiology or medicine and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said during the committee’s announcement on Monday. “Together [the two prize winners] have saved millions of lives, prevented severe COVID-19, reduced the overall disease burden, and enabled societies to open up again.”
Vaccines work by prodding the immune system into generating an immune response to a particular germ, such as a virus.
