Katalin Karikó, Senior Vice President of BioNTech and Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania Perlman School of Medicine, delivered the 2022 Lasker~APSA Lecture at the annual meeting of the AAP/ASCI/APSA on April 9. Karikó spoke about her contributions to the development of a new therapeutic technology based on the modification of messenger RNA, which enabled the rapid development of highly effective Covid-19 vaccines, for which she and her colleague Drew Weissman were recognized with a 2021 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award. Karikó also traced the history of mRNA, from the discovery of the molecule in 1961 through its optimization for delivery to mammalian cells, and charted the path forward toward the development of future therapies.
