Phil Holliger - Biography

Curriculum vitae - Philipp Holliger

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3440-9854
h-index: 56 (source, Google Scholar)
Address: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Francis Crick Avenue, Cambridge CB2 0QH, UK

https://mrclmb.ac.uk/research-leaders/philipp-holliger/
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Philipp_Holliger
@philholliger.bsky.social

Philipp Holliger is a Program Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Phil graduated with 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. In 2024 he was appointed Joint Head of the Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry (PNAC) Division.

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 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. Phil was elected as an EMBO member in 2015 and is a founder and director of the biotechnology company Sortera Bio Ltd. He has been a consultant to several successful biotech companies including Cambridge Antibody Technology / Medimmune / Astra Zeneca, Solexa / Illumina and Domantis / GSK.