mRNA Research

mRNA scientists Drew Weissman, the Roberts Family Professor of Vaccine Research in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, and Katalin Karikó, an adjunct professor of neurosurgery at Penn and a senior vice president at BioNTech. (Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine)

Bijels, or bicontinuous interfacially jammed emulsion gels, are structured emulsions of oil and water that are kept separated by a layer of nanoparticles. Penn Engineering researchers will develop a way of using them to manufacture mRNA-based therapeutics. (Image: Penn Engineering Today)

Twenty-five years ago, Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó struck up their first conversations at Penn by a copy machine, where both were printing journal articles. That chance encounter laid the foundation for a revolution in mRNA technology, innovations that are now being leveraged to confront a host of biomedical challenges. (Image: Peggy Peterson)

Drew Weissman, the Roberts Family Professor of Vaccine Research, and Katalin Karikó, an adjunct professor of Neurosurgery at the Perelman School of Medicine and a senior vice president at BioNTech. (Image: Penn Medicine News)

Katalin Karikó, an adjunct professor of Neurosurgery at Penn and a senior vice president at BioNTech, and Drew Weissman, the Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research. (Image: Penn Medicine News)

A creative rendition of SARS-CoV-2 virus particles, not to scale. As of mid-July, the virus has sickened more than 186 million people worldwide and more than 4 million people have died from it, according to the World Health Organization. Globally, more than 3.3 billion vaccine doses have been administered. (Homepage image: NIAID)

The researchers’ new platform technology, called Very Large Scale Microfluidic Integration, allows tens of thousands of microfluidic units to be incorporated into a single three-dimensionally etched silicon-and-glass wafer. (Image: Penn Engineering Today)

As a global pandemic, COVID-19 spread across the world. But it didn’t hit everyone equally. “Being healthy is essential to human flourishing,” says Jennifer Prah Ruger, who advocates for shared norms in health governance to address global inequalities. (Image: Martin Sanchez, also featured on homepage)