The Washington Post ran two feature articles profiling Drew Weissman, MD, PhD, the Roberts Family Professor of Vaccine Research, and Katalin Karikó, PhD, an adjunct professor of Neurosurgery, who – following a year of publicity and global awards for their research which underpinned the development of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines – receive notes from grateful people thanking them for things like making “hugs and closeness possible again.” After Kariko immigrated to the United States, smuggling money out of Hungary in her daughter’s teddy bear, she met Weissman at Penn and began a partnership combining their two different areas of expertise. Their prescient research investigations beginning more than 20 years ago gave way to a novel vaccine platform built around mRNA. BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna both used Weissman and Kariko’s technology to construct their SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.
