Karikó, Weissman win 2023 Nobel Prize for work on COVID-19 vaccine
Hungarian scientist Katalin Karikó and American scientist Drew Weissman jointly won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries enabling the development of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.
"The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19," the award-giving body said on Monday, October 2.
"The discoveries by the two Nobel Prize laureates were critical for developing effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during the pandemic that began in early 2020," it added.
Nobel Prize also said that their findings "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," it noted.
The Nobel Assembly of Sweden's Karolinska Institute Medical University selects the award, which is among the most renowned in the science community and carries a cash reward of 11 million Swedish crowns (P57 million).
Karikó served as 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.
Meanwhile, Weissman is a professor in vaccine research at the Perelman School. In 1997, Weissman established his research group at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a professor in vaccine research at the Roberts Family Developmental Center and director for RNA Innovations at the Penn Institute.
The medicine prize kicks off this year’s awards with the remaining five to be unveiled in the coming days.
The Swedish king will present the prizes at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10, the death anniversary of Swedish dynamite inventor and affluent businessman Alfred Nobel who established the Nobel Prizes in 1901. The event will be followed by a lavish banquet at city hall.
The Nobel Prizes are given out for accomplishments in science, literature, and peace, with economics being included in the following years.
Among the recipients of the medicine prize is Swede Svante Paabo who received the award last year for sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans, and for discovering a previously unknown human relative, the Denisovans.
In 1945, Alexander Fleming received the award for the discovery of penicillin, and Karl Landsteiner in 1930 for his discovery of human blood groups.