Katalin Kariko

Katalin Kariko is the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist whose decades-long research on nucleoside-modified mRNA laid the technical foundation for all modern mRNA medicines including cancer vaccines. Her key discovery that replacing uridine with pseudouridine in mRNA dramatically reduces immunogenicity while maintaining translational efficiency enabled the development of stable, translatable mRNA therapeutics. She co-invented modified mRNA technology that is now fundamental to personalized mRNA cancer vaccines at BioNTech, Moderna, and beyond. Her perseverance through years of scientific skepticism transformed cancer vaccine technology.