Katalin Kariko, scientific maverick who paved way for mRNA vaccines

Katalin Kariko’s pioneering work -- which paved the way for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines -- has won her the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Kariko's obsession with researching a substance called mRNA to fight disease once cost her a faculty position at a prestigious US university, which dismissed the idea as a dead end.

Now, her pioneering work -- which paved the way for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines -- has won her the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Kariko, 68, spent much of the 1990s writing grant applications to fund her research into "messenger ribonucleic acid" -- genetic molecules that tell cells what proteins to make, essential to keeping our bodies alive and healthy.

She believed mRNA held the key to treating diseases where having more of the right kind of protein can help -- like repairing the brain after a stroke.

But the University of Pennsylvania, where Kariko was on track for a professorship, decided to pull the plug after the grant rejections piled up.

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"I was up for promotion, and then they just demoted me and expected that I would walk out the door," she told AFP in an interview from her home in Philadelphia in December 2020.