Philip Louis Felgner (born 7 February 1950) is an American biochemist and immunologist, specialized in lipofection technology and genetics.
He is currently the director of the UCI Vaccine Research & Development Center as well as the Protein Microarray Laboratory and Training Facility.
[5] 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.
[10] 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.
[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.