Philipp Holliger’s research spans the fields of chemical biology, synthetic biology, and in vitro evolution. His work has been published in major journals (e.g. Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS etc.) and has led to numerous patents. His recent work, describing a range of novel synthetic genetic polymers (XNAs) based on nucleic acids with backbone chemistries that are divergent from the canonical ribofuranose unit of DNA was featured in Scientific American’s 10 World Changing Ideas (2012). He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and a consultant to several successful biotech companies including Cambridge Antibody Technology / Medimmune, Solexa / Illumina, Domantis and GSK.
Philipp is a Program Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. Phil graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich with Steven A Benner. He then moved to Cambridge for a Ph.D. and a postdoctoral fellowship with Sir Gregory Winter. In 2000, he joined the faculty at the prestigious MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology where he was tenured in 2005.
