Nordic Life Science 1
“In the early phase of my carrier, we licensed ma
ny innovations to large companies, but since the 1990s, the preferred route has been to spin-out companies and develop the innovation inside a start-up company,” he says. Uhlén’s diverse portfolio includes companies such as Biotage, which offers workflow solutions and products to customers in drug discovery and development, analytical testing and water and environmental testing to reduce their impact on the globe, and Alligator Bioscience, a research-based biotechnology company developing antibody-based pharmaceuticals for cancer treatment. He has also founded Abclon, a South Korean company listed on the South Korean stock exchange COSDAQ. Alligator and Abclon both specialize in the development of tumor-directed immunotherapies. Over the past decade or so, Uhlén has started an average of one company per year, and expects to continue that pace for a few more years. “I very much enjoy being in both worlds, the academic world, driven by curiosity and full of intellectual challenges, and the business world, driven by courage and full of operational challenges,” Uhlén explains. “However, to do both of these properly, one has to work hard and it is important to foster an environment of efficient and constructive meetings and decisions. As a leader, you need to understand the details to make the right strategic decisions when leading science-driven projects.” A good day, he says, is one full of discussion with talented co-workers. “Actually, this happens every working day and this makes it easy to wake up in the morning.” His passion to understand how humans work in a holistic manner drives his academic research, while his practical side is eager “to deliver solutions that benefit society”. Right now, Mathias Uhlén’s priority on the academic side is preparing new features in the Human Protein Atlas. Most of the attention is on preparing for the next annual launch at the end of the year, and since the Human Protein Atlas hosts more than 20 million pages of information, every new launch is a challenge. The Human Protein Atlas has so far resulted in five major launches, all published in the journal Science; the Tissue Atlas, the Cell Atlas, the Pathology Atlas, the Blood Atlas, and the Brain Atlas. The Human Protein Atlas is now one of the most visited biological resources in the world and the work has been led from the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Stockholm. All of the data is open access, so it can be used by scientists, academics and businesses 28