U.S. Patent 8,278,036 on non-immunogenic, nucleoside-modified RNA was granted to Karikó and Drew Weissman.
On October 2, 2012, the United States Patent and Trademark Office formally granted U.S. Patent 8,278,036, titled covering non-immunogenic, nucleoside-modified RNA, to inventors including Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman.
This grant legally recognized the core discovery that modifying mRNA with nucleosides such as pseudouridine could prevent the immune system from destroying the synthetic RNA before it could produce its intended protein — solving one of the central obstacles that had blocked mRNA therapeutics for decades.
The patent, originally filed in 2005, represented years of legal and scientific vetting, and its issuance came at a time when Karikó had already been forced out of a tenure-track position at the University of Pennsylvania due to lack of funding and institutional support for her research.
This patent became one of the most consequential biomedical patents of the 21st century. It underpinned licensing deals with companies including Moderna and BioNTech, both of which built COVID-19 vaccines using nucleoside-modified mRNA technology derived directly from this invention. The 2012 grant thus marks a quiet but pivotal legal milestone en route to a technology that would eventually save millions of lives worldwide.