Germany's DPMA awarded Karikó and Weissman the inaugural 'Inventor of the Year' prize for their mRNA vaccine research.
On June 20, 2022, Germany's Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt (DPMA), the national patent office, presented Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman with its very first "Inventor of the Year" award, a newly created prize established specifically to recognize this milestone achievement.
This inaugural award honored their groundbreaking research into nucleoside-modified mRNA, technology that had, by 2022, been credited with enabling the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines that were administered to billions of people worldwide, significantly curbing the pandemic's death toll.
As the first-ever recipients of this newly instituted German honor, Karikó and Weissman were recognized not only for their scientific achievement but for exemplifying the kind of transformative, high-impact invention the DPMA sought to celebrate through this new prize category.
This genuine institutional first — the creation of an entirely new award category specifically inaugurated with their names — reflects the extraordinary and unprecedented scale of recognition given to Karikó's mRNA research. It stands as a testament to how her decades of dedicated, often unrewarded scientific work had, by 2022, been elevated to the very pinnacle of international scientific and inventive achievement.