Nordic Life Science 1
BUSINESS // INTERVIEW “PERHAPS THE BEST ADVICE I
CAN GIVE IS TO ACTUALLY TAKE THE 6 X QUICK QUESTIONS 1. Who would you bring to a desert island? “The only person that I would like to be alone with on a desert island is my wife.” 2. If you could live your life again, is there anything you would have done differently? “In business life there are many things that do not go as you intended them to. But one of the things that you need to learn is to cut your losses and move on, and I'm fairly good at that. I have what I call a professional bad memory.” 3. If you could see the world through someone else's eyes for one day, whose eyes would you choose? “I would be interested to look at the world from a pair of Chinese eyes, and see how today’s global developments are perceived through those eyes rather than our western eyes.” 4. What’s the finest compliment that you have ever received and why did it matter to you? “I was fired once by a very charismatic leader. Then I was re-hired the morning after when we both had calmed down a little. And then he said, “we really want you to stay here at the company”, so that was good.” 5. When were you last really sad and why? “At funerals. At my age you lose friends. Not only through accidents but through normal life. You cannot say that the funerals are pleasant, but they are rituals of how to best to deal with that sadness.” 6. What does a really good weekend look like for you? “A really good weekend is at Marstrand. Sail out across the harbor in my small boat “a snipa” and then having lunch outdoors. There's nothing as good as eating in the forest or at sea.” STEP AND GO THROUGH A PROOF OF CONCEPT, BECOME AN ENTREPRENEUR IF YOU WANT TO, OR SEEK OUT ENTREPRENEURS.” are investing in, they're not only a source of capital. The more we can emulate that availability of intelligent capital, or attract intelligent capital from the US or the UK, the more we can use that as a way to replicate things in Sweden.” “Being able to make good pitches, packaging financing rounds, and developing milestones that an investor can look at and say, “we have an opportunity in this”, are also important success factors. All of those are entrepreneurial skills, that is, understanding how investments work rather than science and data.” Sweden has had a lot of success in tech and AI recently. The pharma and life science industry has not seen comparable success, why is that? “Pharma companies are high risk-high reward. That means that you need to attract certain types of investors who know the industry and know it well enough. If they don't know the industry well enough, they usually underestimate the risk. You might have someone making a brilliant pitch that can sell almost anything but then it ends up a disappointment because the risk reward is not well understood. But I think we are improving, we have a number of Swedish scientists and entrepreneurs that have been able to attract capital in the US. I would have liked to see that capital being provided in Sweden but I'm not against the US doing it. It is more important that the medicine gets to the patients than who actually funds it.” ABOUT THE INTERVIEW & THE AUTHOR The interview was conducted during NLSDays 2025, October 14, 2025, by Gustav Ceder, Communications Officer at SciLifeLab and Human Protein Atlas, and writer and communications consultant at Cedera AB. NLS 66 | NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG