Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded to Scientists Who Helped Develop the COVID-19 Vaccine

This year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian-American biochemist, and Drew Weissman, an American physician, for their work on mRNA vaccines. Their research, which was published 15 years before the COVID-19 pandemic, led directly to the first mRNA vaccines to fight COVID-19. Of the 227 people whose work has been recognized with the prize, Karikó is only the thirteenth woman among them.

An mRNA vaccine, like the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, is a type of vaccine that uses a tiny piece of genetic material called messenger RNA (mRNA) to teach our immune systems how to fight off a specific virus. Your immune system learns how to recognize and fight the virus if you ever get exposed to it in the future.



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