BUDAPEST, 2 Oct. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban congratulated the country's first female Nobel laureate, Katalin Karikó, who received the award in the field of medicine together with American Drew Weissman for the development mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.
«Congratulations to the first Hungarian woman Nobel laureate! We are proud! A Hungarian is on top of the world,» Orban wrote on social media, posting a photo with Kariko.
Hungarian President Katalin Nowak also sent her congratulations to Kariko. «Katalin Karikó is the first Hungarian woman to receive a Nobel Prize. We are extremely proud that our nation has been enriched by such a Nobel laureate whose research could save millions of lives. Thank you, Katalin!» — she wrote on the social network Facebook*.
Hungarian biochemist Vatalin Kariko was born in 1955 in Szolnok. In 1978 she graduated from the University of Szeged. Kariko's dissertation was devoted to the synthesis of oligonucleotides (short stretches of DNA and RNA) and the study of their antiviral effects. In 1982 she received her doctorate from the University of Szeged. Professor. Until 1985, she conducted research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Szeged.
In the mid-1980s, Kariko and her family moved to the United States. In 1989, Kariko became an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked until 2013. In the period 2013-2022, she was Senior Vice President of BioNTech SE in Mainz (Germany). Since 2021, Katalin Kariko is a professor at the University of Szeged and an associate professor in neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
For 40 years, Kariko's research has focused on RNA-mediated mechanisms, with the ultimate goal of developing in vitro transcribed mRNA for protein therapy. She studied RNA-mediated immune activation and discovered that nucleoside modifications suppress the immunogenicity of RNA, which expands the therapeutic potential of mRNA.
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