A life in context
The person behind the prize
Karikó earned her doctorate in Szeged and moved to the United States in 1985. She continued pursuing the therapeutic potential of messenger RNA despite repeated setbacks. At the University of Pennsylvania she collaborated with Drew Weissman, and later worked at BioNTech on RNA-based medicines.
The contribution
With Weissman, she showed that modifying certain building blocks of laboratory-made mRNA could reduce unwanted inflammatory responses. Their experiments also helped explain how modified mRNA could produce proteins more efficiently.
The idea in plain language
Messenger RNA is a temporary working copy of genetic instructions. Cells read it to make proteins. Early attempts to use laboratory-made mRNA ran into a problem: immune cells reacted strongly to the message itself.
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