Nordic Life Science 1
Evelina Vågesjö and her co-founders have run the
drug development operations from Ilya Pharma since then, with Vågesjö spurred on by a desire to see her work go beyond the lab. “I wanted to understand if my scientific findings had practical applications,” explains Vågesjö. “It’s fantastic if you can describe 20 different surface markers of an immune cell – but I want to know what they do. The projects [at Uppsala University] became applied science and I wanted to know if they had clinical applications. I hope I can learn enough to make a difference for patients.” Not surprisingly, Vågesjö says the company’s peak so far was when they received the first approval to start the first clinical trial. Having managed her project from an initial idea to clinical proof of concept and scaling of the company, today, at age 34, Evelina Vågesjö, CEO of Ilya Pharma, has been recognized numerous times for her achievements. For example, she has been selected to the Springboard Enterprises’ Health Innovation Hub in the life sciences and she was one of the recipients of the MIT Innovations Under 35 award in 2019. Besides her PhD in Physiology, Vågesjö also has a BSc in management accounting and an MBA focused on finance and mergers and acquisitions, which she says came in handy as she got Ilya Pharma up and running. “Science and business administration really complement each other. My business studies also helped me see the need for practical applications of discoveries.” 36