Yes. I studied at the University of Szeged, and all of the work I did in this research center, which belonged to the academia, this was a different entity, but you could work there and get your PhD work done there. I always work in this research center, not at the university. I did the lipid work also there, and that's when another team member came, and head of the team, Janos[?] Tomas, and he actually synthesized cap for Aaron Shatkin and send it to New Jersey to identify because he was organic chemist.

Janos[?] was organic chemist. Aaron Shatkin needed reference material. What kind of structure is the Cap? He synthesized. When I went there, everybody was talking like, GPPPPGGPPPPG, but they didn't know how many Ps are there. I started in this team, but my responsibility was to make anti-viral small RNA molecule, which was 2’ 5’ linked. I have to make with enzymatically, chemically synthesized because Janos[?] Tomas believed that we need a anti-viral compound.

This was just discovered by Ian Kerr in London, that this is responsible for the interferon anti-viral effect. We need an anti-viral compound, that was a very important thing at that time, and so that was my project. To make 2' 5', link it would be the best if there would be 3'-dioxin, which is analog, a nucleoside analog. My thesis work was, orally, I used modified nucleosides to synthesize this anti-viral compound, and set up the laboratory to screen for anti-viral compounds. Viruses I worked. David Baltimore book on viruses, I started to read, and I was amazed.

Dr. Katalin Kariko is a biochemist and adjunct professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania. She won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work in developing mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. She completed her schooling at the University of Szeged and carried out her post-doctoral work at the Institute of Biochemistry, Biological Research Centre of Hungary.

Dr. Kariko received her Bachelor of Sciences in Biology in 1978 and her PhD in Biochemistry in 1982 from the University of Szeged. She completed her post-doctoral work at the Institute of Biochemistry, Biological Research Centre of Hungary until 1985, when her lab at the Biological Research Centre lost funding. She then moved to the United States and carried out post-doctoral work at Temple University from 1981 to 1988 and at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences from 1988 to 1989. She then joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in the Perelman School of Medicine’s neurosurgery department in 1989.

At the University of Pennsylvania, she began to collaborate with immunologist Drew Weissman, where the two experimented with modifying mRNA. In the early 2000’s, Kariko and Weissman discovered that swapping uridine with pseudouridine in mRNA created a molecule with favorable attributes such as reduced adverse reactions. This breakthrough led the way for many other modified mRNA molecules to be potentially used in a multitude of future medical applications, including developing effective mRNA vaccines against the COVID-19 virus during the height of the pandemic in 2020. For their development of mRNA biotechnology, Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Outside of the Nobel Prize, Dr. Kariko has received numerous awards for her contributions to science including the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award in 2021, the Novo Nordisk Prize in 2022, being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2023, the Harvey Prize in Human Health in 2024, and elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2025.