Christian Plank graduated in biochemstry from the University of Vienna in Austria in 1994. He carried out his Ph.D. thesis at the Research Institute for Molecular Pathology in Vienna in the research group of Prof. Ernst Wagner. From there he moved on to the University of California in San Francisco where he was a postdoctoral fellow in the research group of Prof. Francis C. Szoka at the School of Pharmacy. Since 1997 Christian Plank is head of a research group at the Institute of Experimental Oncology (further website) which focusses on nucleic acid and gene therapies as well as on molecular medicine and molecular imaging. Christian Plank has been principal investigator and coordinator of numerous grant projects that have focussed on nonviral nucleic acid delivery. He has developed a method of magnetically guided nucleic acid delivery which is known as Magnetofection. In 2003, Christian Plank was a co-founder OZ Biosciences, a company that develops and markets reagents and technologies for the delivery of active substances to living cells. In 2009, Christian Plank and Carsten Rudolph founded ethris GmbH, a company which develops novel nucleic acid therapeutics. Christian Plank's research group participates in interdisciplinary research networks of nanotechnology and nanobiotechnology such as the Cluster of Excellence "Nanosystems Initiative Munich".