Meet the woman whose pioneering research led to the creation of covid vaccines

The woman whose pioneering research led to the creation of covid vaccines insists hundreds of thousands of scientists laid the foundation work, writes Eoin English

Katalin Karikó at University College Cork, where she was awarded an honorary doctorate for her outstanding contributions to science and public health. Picture: Daragh McSweeney/Provision.

The Nobel Prize in medicine has been awarded to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against covid-19.

She’s been described as the woman who shielded the world from covid, whose work saved millions of lives, protected billions more, and helped turn the tide of the pandemic, but for Dr Karikó, whose pioneering research led to the creation of covid vaccines, it’s all about the science.

The 68-year-old Hungarian-born scientist, whose decades-long work on messenger RNA (mRNA) laid the foundations for the development of the two main covid vaccines, points out that while the first of the more than 100-awards for her work came in 1973, the second one didn’t come until 2021.

“That’s a lot of time in between,” she says with a grin.

“I was fine with that. I did not crave recognition. Some people wanted my name out there but I was not that person, ever.

"I have not been in the spotlight. For four decades, I worked quietly in the laboratory, poured gels, isolated plasmids, wrote the lab notes, and designed and performed the experiments by myself. 

"I knew that what I was doing is important and didn’t expect anybody to tap my shoulder praising me for my work."

But now that the praise is flowing, the no-nonsense professor at the University of Szeged and adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine, at the University of Pennsylvania, insists that she was just one small part of a much bigger jigsaw that led to the creation of the vaccines.

 Dr Katalin Kariko,  whose work was central to the development of covid vaccines used all over the world, was in Trinity College Dublin to receive the 2023 Dawson prize in Genetics. She is joined by Professors Matthew Campbell and Jane Farrar. Picture: Chris Bellew / Fennell Photography

The real focus should be on the science, on fostering greater public understanding of that science, and on encouraging more people to study, she tells the Irish Examiner, before being conferred with an honorary doctorate at UCC on Wednesday.

“When you ask young people what they want to be they say they want to be ‘an influencer’. But I think I should be influencing more people into science,” she says.

“When we have a product approved by the EMA and the FDA, it’s not helping society if society does not approve of it, or of us.

“We have to have society accepting and respecting the science."

“Some people already have loaded questions and a particular mindset, and that’s fine but scientists who know the information must work to get that to the people who genuinely want to understand.” 

Education

Dr Karikó, known to friends as Kati, grew up in a small Hungarian town of just 10,000 people. Her mother was a bookkeeper, her father a butcher, and from them she learned the value of hard work — and how to make sausage.

In their big garden, she watched as chickens hatched from eggs, as plants grew from the small seeds they planted, and she was curious, a curiosity fostered by great teachers in school.

After earning her PhD from the University of Szeged, Hungary, in 1982, she continued her research and postdoctoral studies at the Institute of Biochemistry, Biological Research Centre of Hungary but when the lab lost its funding in 1985, she moved with her husband, and then two-year-old daughter, Susan, to the US, smuggling some €900 in a teddy bear in with them.

There, she did postdoctoral fellowships in two labs before accepting a position at the University of Pennsylvania, where she collaborated with several clinical investigators.

Many academics considered her mRNA work a research wilderness, and she had to overcome grant rejection after grant rejection, and years of funding uncertainty.

She persevered through the 1990s and recalls being demoted by one university for “lack of performance” and being threatened by a senior academic with possible deportation from the US on another occasion after expressing an interest in transferring from one lab to another.

Determination

But she always believed that mRNA, the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to each cell’s protein-making machinery, could be used to instruct cells to make their own medicines, including vaccines.

She joined forces with immunologist, Drew Weissman, and they finally discovered how to overcome the potentially lethal inflammatory response caused by synthetic mRNA that had precluded its use in humans.

In 2013, Dr Karikó moved to BioNTech, where she served as senior vice president until 2022, and where their technology was already being used in flu vaccine trials as the covid pandemic hit.

Dr Katalin Karikó: 'Every time I accept an award or give a lecture, I try to point out the hundreds of thousands of scientists who did the work before me.'

The technology was then adapted for covid, trials were fast-tracked, and it led to rapid development of the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna covid-19 vaccines, which are now protecting billions of people around the world.

Modified mRNA technology promises to deliver many other medical interventions for a wide range of health conditions, Dr Karikó says.

She gets more interview requests today than her daughter Susan, a two-time Olympic gold medallist rower —who was thrilled that her mother was in Cork, home to the O'Donovan brothers, to collect the honorary doctorate from UCC a day after she picked up the 2023 Dawson prize in genetics from Trinity.

“Every time I accept an award or give a lecture, I try to point out the hundreds of thousands of scientists who did the work before me — some of them are with us today, and some who are not," Dr Karikó says.

“It is not one person. It is not one field.

"We wouldn’t have the vaccine if we didn’t have Twitter to direct us to the sequencing information, or our Chinese counterparts who sequenced, and the sequencing machine had to be invented, and this all happened in our lifetime.

If 20 years ago we had this pandemic, we couldn’t have started to make the vaccine because the information just was not there. 

"A lot of people in different fields had to work together so that we could do this and of course, it didn’t happen overnight.

“I know what I did and how it happened and that for me was enough. Other people don’t have to know.

“I was never this person who pushed myself to the front. I imagined so many times that in 100 years people won’t know that we scientists existed.

“So many other people worked on this, so I share the credit every time.” 

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Despite criticism about vaccine inequality, Dr Karikó insists that some populations in certain developing countries are resistant to vaccines and that vaccine manufacturing facilities just can’t be built anywhere —given the scale of investment required, they have to be sustainable and adaptable over the longer-term.

Dr Katalin Karikó said covid-deniers never worked on the frontlines.

She says as the illness caused by covid becomes less severe, certain cohorts only may require boosters jabs up to twice a year for the coming years, and she dismisses claims from covid deniers and anti-vaxxers, pointing out that much of the “fake news” during the pandemic came from those who were not on the frontline.

“None of them worked in a hospital,” she says.

She has also encouraged medical and science students to love their work, learn how to handle stress, to be open to learning from all sources, and never hold a grudge. 

"I am thankful to those who tried to make my life miserable. I learned from them that in life not everybody is rooting for me. They made me work harder, made me better and more resilient," she says.