UPenn Researchers Win Nobel Prize For mRNA COVID Vaccine Work

PHILADELPHIA — Two professors at the University of Pennsylvania have won the highest award in their field: the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman were awarded the Nobel Prize for their "critical" discoveries regarding mRNA vaccines for COVID-19.

"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," according to the Nobel Foundation.

Read more about their critical research online here.

Karikó was born in 1955 in Szolnok, Hungary and earned her PhD from Szeged’s University in 1982 and performed postdoctoral research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged until 1985.

She then conducted postdoctoral research at Temple University, and the University of Health Science in Bethesda, Maryland.

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.

Weissman was born in 1959 in Lexington, Massachusetts.

He received his MD, PhD degrees from Boston University in 1987.

He did his clinical training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School and postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health.

In 1997, Weissman established his research group at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is the Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research and Director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovations.