2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Katalin Karikó (born 1955) and Drew Weissman (born 1959) "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19".

Katalin Karikó
Katalin Karikó was born on January 17, 1955, in Szolnok, Hungary. From the University of Szeged, she received a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1982. From 2013 to 2022, she was associated with BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals, first as a vice president and promoted to senior vice president in 2019. This company, a division of BioNTech, commercialized mRNA vaccines at a global scale.

Drew Weissman
Drew Weissman was born on September 7, 1959, in Lexington, Massachusetts and received a Ph.D. in 1987 at Boston University. He started studying RNA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, where he met Karikó.

Key publications
The following publications were the fundamental researches that motivated the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet to award the 2023 Prize to Karikó and Weissman:


 * Karikó, K., Buckstein, M., Ni, H. and Weissman, D. Suppression of RNA Recognition by Toll-like Receptors: The impact of nucleoside modification and the evolutionary origin of RNA. Immunity 23, 165–175 (2005).
 * Karikó, K., Muramatsu, H., Welsh, F.A., Ludwig, J., Kato, H., Akira, S. and Weissman, D. Incorporation of pseudouridine into mRNA yields superior nonimmunogenic vector with increased translational capacity and biological stability. Mol Ther 16, 1833–1840 (2008).
 * Anderson, B.R., Muramatsu, H., Nallagatla, S.R., Bevilacqua, P.C., Sansing, L.H., Weissman, D. and Karikó, K. Incorporation of pseudouridine into mRNA enhances translation by diminishing PKR activation. Nucleic Acids Res. 38, 5884–5892 (2010).