The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced the prize on Monday, October 2, 2023, praising the laureates for their contributions to the fight against the pandemic that has claimed over 10 million lives worldwide.
Karikó and Weissman discovered how to modify nucleosides, the building blocks of RNA, to prevent the immune system from attacking mRNA molecules that carry genetic instructions for making proteins. This breakthrough paved the way for creating mRNA vaccines that can instruct cells to produce antigens, such as the spike protein of the coronavirus, and trigger an immune response.
The first mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, were authorized for emergency use in late 2020 and early 2021, respectively. These vaccines have shown high efficacy and safety in clinical trials and real-world studies, and have been administered to over 6 billion people globally.
The Nobel Committee said that the laureates’ discoveries have “fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system” and have “opened up new possibilities for developing vaccines and therapeutics against many diseases”.
Karikó, born in Hungary in 1955, is a senior vice president at BioNTech and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Weissman, born in the USA in 1958, is a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. They have collaborated since 1998 and have published several papers on mRNA technology.
The laureates will share the prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million) and receive a gold medal and a diploma at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, 2023.
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