Scientists Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman from Hungary and the United States respectively won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries enabling the development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, the award-giving body said on Monday.
The prize, among the most prestigious in the scientific world, is selected by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden's Karolinska Institute medical university and also comes with 11 million Swedish crowns .
Kariko was senior vice president and head of RNA protein replacement at BioNTech until 2022 and has since acted as an adviser to the company. She is also a professor at the University of Szeged in Hungary and adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.Kariko found a way to prevent the immune system from launching an inflammatory reaction against lab-made mRNA, previously seen as a major hurdle against any therapeutic use of mRNA.
"So this year's Nobel Prize recognizes their basic science discovery that fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with the immune system and had a major impact on society during the recent pandemic," said Rickard Sandberg, member of the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute The Swedish king will present the prizes at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death, followed by a lavish banquet at city hall.for sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans, and for discovering a previously unknown human relative, the Denisovans.
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