European Patent EP3112467B1, naming Karikó as inventor, was granted by the EPO for further mRNA innovations.
On May 9, 2018, the European Patent Office granted European Patent EP3112467B1, a further mRNA-related patent listing Katalin Karikó among its inventors.
This patent added to the growing European intellectual property estate protecting nucleoside-modified mRNA technologies, building on the earlier EP2510099B1 grant and reflecting the continuous refinement of the core discoveries first made at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 2000s.
By 2018, mRNA vaccine technology was gaining renewed scientific and commercial interest, with companies like BioNTech and Moderna investing heavily in clinical development pipelines for cancer immunotherapies and infectious disease vaccines based on these patented techniques.
This grant is significant not only for the specific technical improvements it protected, but as evidence of the sustained, multi-year patenting strategy that secured Karikó's inventions across multiple jurisdictions. Just two years later, in 2020, this body of patented work would form the scientific basis for the rapid development of the BioNTech-Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, one of the first authorized worldwide.