Phillip Holliger

Program Leader, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Philipp Holliger is a Program Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Phil graduated with a distinction from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland, where he worked with Prof. Steven A Benner before moving to Cambridge, UK for a PhD with Sir Greg Winter (Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2018) at the Cambridge Centre for Protein Engineering (CPE), where he stayed for his postdoctoral studies. In 2000 he was appointed to an independent tenure-track group leader position at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB) and became a tenured program leader at MRC-LMB in 2005.

His 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, eLife etc.) and has led to numerous patents. His 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 has featured in Scientific American’s 10 World Changing Ideas 2012. He has been elected member of EMBO in 2015 and has been a consultant to several successful biotech companies including Cambridge Antibody Technology / Medimmune / Astra Zeneca, Solexa / Illumina and Domantis / GSK.