His work was integral to the development of CRISPR-Cas, a versatile biochemical method for targeted genetic engineering.
For this work, he was awarded the 2015 Massry Prize along with Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, as well as the 2016 Canada Gairdner International Award, with his Massry co-laureates in addition to Feng Zhang, Rodolphe Barrangou, Anthony Fauci, and Frank Plummer.
After attending school in Colmar, Horvath studied cellular and molecular biology at the Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, where he obtained a Master's in 1996 and a Ph.D. in 2000.
[1] Since late 2002, Philippe's research activities have centered around CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats).
As this prokaryotic viral defense mechanism was understood, it was recognized that CRISPRs could be used with specific endonuclease enzymes for genome editing and gene regulation.