Philip Felgner

Philip Louis Felgner (born 7 February 1950) is an American biochemist and immunologist, specialized in lipofection technology and genetics. He is one of the developers of the vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, responsible for COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently the director of the UCI Vaccine Research & Development Center as well as the Protein Microarray Laboratory and Training Facility.

In 1972, he graduated in biochemistry from the Michigan State University, earning his master's degree in 1975 and his Ph.D. in 1978. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Virginia.

While working at Syntex in the mid-1980s, Felgner pioneered the use of artificially-created cationic lipids (positively-charged lipids) to bind lipids to nucleic acids in order to transfect the latter into cells. Later while working at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, he performed experiments on the transfection of RNA into human, rat, mouse, Xenopus, and Drosophila cells, work which was published in 1989. In 1990, while working at Vical, he collaborated with the University of Wisconsin, discovering that injection of pDNA and mRNA into mouse skeletal muscle resulted in high protein expression levels. These research are recognized as among the earliest steps towards mRNA vaccine development.

In 2021, he was awarded the Princess of Asturias Awards for Technical and Scientific Research along Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman, Uğur Şahin, Özlem Türeci, Derrick Rossi, and Sarah Gilbert.

In 2022, Philip Felgner received the A.D. Bangham FRS Life Achievement Award, an award named in honor of Dr. Alec Douglas Bangham, known as the father of liposomes.

In 2022, Philip Felgner was awarded the Robert Koch Prize, one of the stepping-stones to eventual Nobel Prize recognition for scientists in the fields of microbiology and immunology, for his fundamental contributions to the development of lipofection technology, a technology widely used in basic research in medicine for introducing active substances into cells and also the basis of modern mRNA vaccines.

In 2022, Philip Felgner was named Fellow by National Academy of Inventors. As of 2022, he has published 280 papers that have been cited 44,000 times and has 53 U.S. patents and 56 foreign patents, including 14 licensed patents.

In 2023, the pioneering work of synthesizing the first cationic lipid (DOTMA) (lipofectin) for DNA and RNA delivery into cells by Philip Felgner was mentioned in the advanced scientific information posted by the Nobel Prize committee for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023. Provided by Wikipedia