Philippe Horvath is a French

scientist A scientist is a person who conducts Scientific method, scientific research to advance knowledge in an Branches of science, area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, ...

working for

DuPont DuPont de Nemours, Inc., commonly shortened to DuPont, is an American multinational chemical company first formed in 1802 by French-American chemist and industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours. The company played a major role in ...

Nutrition and Health. His work was integral to the development of CRISPR-Cas, a versatile biochemical method for targeted

genetic engineering Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification or genetic manipulation, is the modification and manipulation of an organism's genes using technology. It is a set of technologies used to change the genetic makeup of cells, including t ...

. For this work, he was awarded the 2015

Massry Prize The Massry Prize was established in 1996, and until 2009 was administered by the Meira and Shaul G. Massry Foundation. The Prize, of $40,000 and the Massry Lectureship, is bestowed upon scientists who have made substantial recent contributions in ...

along with

Emmanuelle Charpentier Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier (; born 11 December 1968) is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry. As of 2015, she has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2018, sh ...

and

Jennifer Doudna Jennifer Anne Doudna (; born February 19, 1964) is an American biochemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Doudna was one of the first women to share a ...

, as well as the 2016

Canada Gairdner International Award The Canada Gairdner International Award is given annually by the Gairdner Foundation at a special dinner to five individuals for outstanding discoveries or contributions to medical science. Receipt of the Gairdner is traditionally considered a p ...

, with his Massry co-laureates in addition to

Feng Zhang Feng Zhang (; born October 22, 1981) is a Chinese-American biochemist. Zhang currently holds the James and Patricia Poitras Professorship in Neuroscience at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and in the departments of Brain and Cognitive ...

Rodolphe Barrangou Rodolphe Barrangou is the Todd R. Klaenhammer Distinguished Professor in Probiotics Research in the Department of Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences at North Carolina State University; Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CRISPR Bio ...

Anthony Fauci Anthony Stephen Fauci (; born December 24, 1940) is an American physician-scientist and immunologist serving as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the chief medical advisor to the president. ...

, and

Frank Plummer Francis Allan Plummer (2 December 1952 – 4 February 2020) was a Canadian scientist, academic and HIV/AIDS researcher. He was "a recognized specialist in infectious diseases whose work influenced public health policy in Canada and abroad". He was ...

Career

After attending school in

Colmar Colmar (, ; Alsatian: ' ; German during 1871–1918 and 1940–1945: ') is a city and commune in the Haut-Rhin department and Grand Est region of north-eastern France. The third-largest commune in Alsace (after Strasbourg and Mulhouse), it is ...

, Horvath studied cellular and molecular biology at the Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, where he obtained a

Master's A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.

in 1996 and a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

in 2000. After graduation, he went to the Department of Research and Development of Rhodia Food (formerly

Rhône-Poulenc Rhône-Poulenc () was a French chemical and pharmaceutical company founded in 1928. In 1999 it merged with Hoechst AG to form Aventis. As of 2015, the pharmaceutical operations of Rhône-Poulenc are part of Sanofi and the chemicals divisions ar ...

) in

Dangé-Saint-Romain Dangé-Saint-Romain () is a commune in the Vienne department in the Nouvelle Aquitaine region formerly in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region in western France. Its inhabitants are called the « Dangéens » or « Dangéennes ». Demographics See a ...

, where he worked to develop molecular biology techniques for bacterial strain screening, microbial identification, and typing of lactic acid

bacteria Bacteria (; singular: bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one biological cell. They constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria were among ...

and their phages. In 2004, Rhodia Food was acquired by

Danisco Danisco A/S is a Danish bio-based company with activities in food production, enzymes and other bioproducts as well as a wide variety of pharmaceutical grade excipients. It was formed in 1989 from the largest Danish industrial merger ever of th ...

, and Philippe was promoted to senior scientist in 2006. The division was later purchased by

in 2011, and Horvath was appointed an Associate to the DuPort Fellows Forum in 2014, and a DuPont Nutrition & Health Technical Fellow in 2015.

Research

Since late 2002, Philippe's research activities have centered around

CRISPR CRISPR () (an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is a family of DNA sequences found in the genomes of prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria and archaea. These sequences are derived from DNA fragments of bacte ...

(clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). Early work was stimulated by with the aim of improving the durability of

l starter cultures to improve the manufacture of

cheese Cheese is a dairy product produced in wide ranges of flavors, textures, and forms by coagulation of the milk protein casein. It comprises proteins and fat from milk, usually the milk of cows, buffalo, goats, or sheep. During production, ...

and

ice cream Ice cream is a sweetened frozen food typically eaten as a snack or dessert. It may be made from milk or cream and is flavoured with a sweetener, either sugar or an alternative, and a spice, such as cocoa or vanilla, or with fruit such as str ...

, particularly efforts to address

bacteriophage A bacteriophage (), also known informally as a ''phage'' (), is a duplodnaviria virus that infects and replicates within bacteria and archaea. The term was derived from "bacteria" and the Greek φαγεῖν ('), meaning "to devour". Bacteri ...

s---

virus A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Since Dmitri Ivanovsky's 1 ...

es that infect bacteria. Horvath explored sections in the bacterial

genome In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding ge ...

with clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, both for their utility in differentiating between strains, and because of their role in the bacterial

immune system The immune system is a network of biological processes that protects an organism from diseases. It detects and responds to a wide variety of pathogens, from viruses to parasitic worms, as well as cancer cells and objects such as wood splinte ...

. As this

prokaryotic A prokaryote () is a Unicellular organism, single-celled organism that lacks a cell nucleus, nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles. The word ''prokaryote'' comes from the Greek language, Greek wikt:πρό#Ancient Greek, πρό (, 'before') a ...

viral defense mechanism was understood, it was recognized that CRISPRs could be used with specific

endonuclease Endonucleases are enzymes that cleave the phosphodiester bond within a polynucleotide chain. Some, such as deoxyribonuclease I, cut DNA relatively nonspecifically (without regard to sequence), while many, typically called restriction endonucleases ...

enzymes Enzymes () are proteins that act as biological catalysts by accelerating chemical reactions. The molecules upon which enzymes may act are called substrate (chemistry), substrates, and the enzyme converts the substrates into different molecule ...

for

genome editing Genome editing, or genome engineering, or gene editing, is a type of genetic engineering in which DNA is inserted, deleted, modified or replaced in the genome of a living organism. Unlike early genetic engineering techniques that randomly inserts ...

and gene regulation. As of 2016, Philippe has been the co-inventor of 95

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

s and/or applications, and co-author of 31

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

research articles.

External links

Philippe Horvath
on

ORCID The ORCID (; Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic ...

Philippe Horvath
on ''Researcher ID''
Philippe Horvath
on the ''Copains d’avant'' social network

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Horvath, Philippe 1970 births Living people DuPont people French geneticists University of Strasbourg alumni French bacteriologists Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute) laureates