Philip Louis Felgner (born 7 February 1950) is an American biochemist and immunologist, specialized inlipofection technology and genetics.[1] He is one of the developers of thevaccine against theSARS-CoV-2 virus, responsible forCOVID-19 pandemic. He is currently the director of theUCI Vaccine Research & Development Center as well as the Protein Microarray Laboratory and Training Facility.[2]
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 totransfect the latter into cells.[4] Later while working at theSalk Institute for Biological Studies inSan Diego,California, he performed experiments on thetransfection of RNA into human, rat, mouse,Xenopus, andDrosophila cells, work which was published in 1989.[5] In 1990, while working at Vical, he collaborated with theUniversity of Wisconsin, discovering that injection of pDNA and mRNA into mouse skeletal muscle resulted in high protein expression levels.[6][7] These research are recognized as among the earliest steps towardsmRNA vaccine development.[8]
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.[10]
In 2022, Philip Felgner was awarded theRobert Koch Prize, one of the stepping-stones to eventualNobel Prize recognition for scientists in the fields of microbiology and immunology, for his fundamental contributions to the development oflipofection technology, a technology widely used in basic research in medicine for introducing active substances into cells and also the basis of modernmRNA vaccines.[11][12]
In 2022, Philip Felgner was named Fellow byNational Academy of Inventors.[13] 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.[14]
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.[15][16]
