Brandeis University announced the Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research to Karikó and Weissman.
On February 24, 2020, Brandeis University announced that the prestigious Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research for 2020 would be given to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman.
The award recognized their pioneering work on nucleic acid modification, particularly the discovery that modifying nucleosides in synthetic mRNA could prevent excessive immune activation while preserving protein-coding function — a discovery that by this point was just beginning to be harnessed for COVID-19 vaccine candidates as the pandemic emerged globally.
The Rosenstiel Award has a long history of preceding Nobel Prize recognition, having been awarded to numerous eventual Nobel laureates in medicine and physiology. Its announcement in early 2020, mere weeks before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, proved remarkably prescient.
This recognition marked one of the first major American scientific honors bestowed on Karikó for her foundational RNA research, coming after decades in which her work had often been overlooked, underfunded, or dismissed by the broader scientific establishment. It represented an early sign of the wave of major awards that would follow as mRNA vaccines were rapidly developed and deployed later that same year.