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Katalin Karikó

File:Katalin_Karikó_by_Michel_2024_02.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

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Katalin Karikó

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Also known as Karikó Katalin, K. Karikó

Hungarian biochemist

OverviewAI-generated

Katalin Karikó is a Hungarian and American researcher, biochemist, university teacher, and inventor. Born in Szolnok in 1955, she was educated at the University of Szeged. Her field of work focuses on messenger RNA and biochemistry. She has served as an employee at the University of Pennsylvania, BioNTech, Temple University, and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Karikó resides in Philadelphia and Abington Township and speaks Hungarian and English.

She is a member of the Academia Europaea, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Karikó has received the Rosenstiel Award, the Széchenyi Prize, the Wilhelm Exner Medal, and the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research. She is recognized in the Nobel Medicine collection and the National Inventors Hall Of Fame collection. Her daughter is Susan Francia.

Synthesized by Vinony from 40 facts across 8 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, Open Library, MusicBrainz, Firecrawl, Nobel Prize, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Works
1

Top works

  • Breaking Through

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Gender
Female
Origin
Japan

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

  1. Socioemotional Wealth and Business Risks in Family-controlled Firms: Evidence from Spanish Olive Oil Mills

    · 2007 · cited 3,655x

  2. Matrix Crosslinking Forces Tumor Progression by Enhancing Integrin Signaling

    · 2009 · cited 3,626x

  3. The repertoire of mutational signatures in human cancer

    · 2020 · cited 3,337x

  4. FSP1 is a glutathione-independent ferroptosis suppressor

    · 2019 · cited 3,007x

  5. Pan-cancer analysis of whole genomes

    · 2020 · cited 2,828x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

  • “The idea was to give our cells, thanks to messenger Rna (mRna), the instructions to produce proteins capable of curing diseases. ... with RNA he can make his cells produce that protein continuously for 2-3 days and everything is resolved.”
  • “With mRna I can get my muscle cells to start producing Epo. And even if Epo degrades after two hours and mRna degrades after five days, once you have produced red blood cells they last up to three hundred days. I'm working on an anticancer idea: injecting an mRna into the tumor that prompts the cancer cells to do something that gets the attention of the immune system: release cytokines. It's like saying to the immune cells, "Come here! Come here!".”
  • “In the American university system you are not salaried: you have to bring the funding for your research, winning scholarships. I kept trying, but my questions were turned down. My research colleagues understood that I was working on interesting things and they subsidized me until the beautiful age of 58. I left the University of Pennsylvania after 24 years of work, without ever having had a proposal for a professorship or a permanent contract.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Nobel Prize

  • The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine2023

    “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19”

    Shared · 1/2 portion

NobelPrize.org →

Official website

Provider Profile | Penn Medicine

pennmedicine.org →

Link to the official site · 4,448 chars · not written by Vinony

~20 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Katalin "Kati" Karikó (born 17 January 1955) is a Hungarian biochemist who specializes in ribonucleic acid (RNA)-mediated mechanisms, particularly in vitro-transcribed messenger RNA (mRNA) for protein replacement therapy. Karikó laid the scientific groundwork for mRNA vaccines, overcoming major obstacles and skepticism in the scientific community. Karikó received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023 for her work, along with American immunologist Drew Weissman.

Karikó co-founded and was CEO of RNARx from 2006 to 2013. From 2013 to 2022, she was associated with BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals, first as a vice president and promoted to senior vice president in 2019. In 2022, she left BioNTech to devote more time to research. In 2021, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Szeged in Hungary, where she has since become a professor. While Karikó has also been associated with the University of Pennsylvania, which would benefit financially from her eventual discovery, the university had actively discouraged her from pursuing research by underfunding and deprioritizing work on mRNA. After being demoted by the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, Karikó was never granted tenure and joined BioNTech in 2013 after the university had declined to reinstate her.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Katalin Karikó” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Gallery (5)

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