mRNA vaccine pioneers win medicine Nobel prize

Nobel prize in medicine winners

Source: © Nobel Prize Outreach/Niklas Elmehed

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman honoured for breakthroughs that enable the rapid development of new vaccines, including several of those used against Covid-19

The 2023 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded jointly to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for research that was critical in the development of mRNA vaccines against Covid-19.

The Nobel committee honoured Hungarian-born biochemist Karikó and US immunologist Weissman ‘for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against Covid-19’.