![]() “Whether we got more protein, better delivery, or any kind of data, that gave us the push when we were deep in the problems,” she recalled. Seeing progress, no matter how gradual, kept her going. “There were low points, but every time something went wrong, I tried to focus on the things I could change,” she said. For the first 40 years of her research career, she did not receive a single R01 grant, the main way the National Institutes of Health funds scientists. On persevering against the oddsĮven though Karikó’s breakthrough research has brought her recognition, and with it grant money, her trajectory was not without its low points. In 1990, she ended up in Philadelphia, studying the mechanisms of mRNA biology at Penn. “I was just so determined to go somewhere, do something” with RNA, she said. She wanted to go wherever the best mRNA science was, if that meant academia or biotech, Japan or Pennsylvania, where she worked at Arbutus Biopharma, previously Tekmira. Karikó grew up in Hungary, where at 16 she already knew she wanted to be a scientist, and her dedication to mRNA took her around the world. “I always looked to RNA to develop therapeutics,” she said, and shared details about her journey to BioNTech as well as her unyielding faith in the technology she was developing. ![]() Speaking at the 2021 STAT Breakthrough Science Summit Wednesday, Karikó shared how despite many, many failures - including demotions, grant rejections, and more - she was clear in her focus. One of the key figures behind this achievement was Katalin Karikó, senior vice president of the German biotech company BioNTech and adjunct associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Developed over an arduous 40 years, it was the result of an unlikely success story. In the span of the Covid-19 pandemic, and thanks to the success of two of the currently available vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, messenger RNA, or mRNA, went from being an obscure cell biology concept understood and mentioned only by scientists to being a household term.īut the technology behind the mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer and BioNTech is anything but new. Exclusive analysis of biotech, pharma, and the life sciences Learn More
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