Karikó and Drew Weissman filed the U.S. patent application that became US8278036B2, covering non-immunogenic nucleoside-modified RNA.
On December 12, 2005, Katalin Karikó and her long-time collaborator Drew Weissman filed a U.S. patent application covering non-immunogenic, nucleoside-modified RNA — the technology that would eventually become U.S. Patent 8,278,036.
This filing formalized years of painstaking laboratory work at the University of Pennsylvania, where Karikó and Weissman had discovered that substituting modified nucleosides, such as pseudouridine, into synthetic mRNA dramatically reduced the immune system's inflammatory reaction to the foreign RNA while preserving its ability to direct protein production.
At the time, this insight was met with limited enthusiasm from the broader scientific community and pharmaceutical industry, and the pair struggled to secure funding or licensing interest. Nevertheless, this patent filing represented the critical intellectual property foundation upon which future mRNA vaccine platforms — including those developed by Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer — would later be built.
The filing exemplifies how transformative science often originates from unglamorous, underfunded research pursued against prevailing scientific fashion. It would take nearly fifteen years, and a global pandemic, for the world to recognize the significance of what Karikó and Weissman had filed that December day.