Mathias Uhlén – Driven by curiosity and courage

Being a scientist or an entrepreneur is hard enough. Doing both at the same time sounds like an Olympic sport.

Swedish scientist and “serial entrepreneur” Dr. Mathias Uhlén, PhD., professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, though, makes it look easy. Not only has he founded more than 20 companies in recent years, but his research has generated more than 650 publications and he is now one of the most cited researchers in Sweden, with more than 8,000 citations last year.

Uhlén’s work focuses on protein science, antibody engineering, engineering and precision medicine. One of his biggest projects over the past 18 years has been spearheading an international effort to create a Human Protein Atlas. The project involves mapping all the human proteins in cells, tissues and organs and making it readily available to a wide audience.

A diverse portfolio of companies

Part of the incentive for founding so many companies, according to Mathias Uhlén, was to provide the most expedient way to transform ideas into applications.

“In the early phase of my carrier, we licensed many 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.

The best of both worlds

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.”

“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.”

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.”

The Human Protein Atlas

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 and provides more information about proteins than anyone had compiled before. The atlas team is using an integration of various omics technologies, including antibody-based imaging, mass spectrometry-based proteomics, transcriptomics and systems biology.

“We have more than 300,000 visits to the open access resource every month and I believe that the knowledge in the atlas provides a basis for a large portion of medical research, both in academia and industry,” Uhlén adds.

Lessons from the pandemic

However, last year was different in many ways. The team focused a lot on the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, with efforts to try to understand the biology of the virus and research to study the immune responses across the population.

“On the business side, I co-founded a coronavirus diagnostics company and this company now has close to 100 employees.”

“On the business side, I co-founded a coronavirus diagnostics company and this company now has close to 100 employees,” Uhlén says. “We have set up one of the largest facilities for PCR-testing in Sweden, using the experience from the HPA program aimed to help the government and the health system to combat the disease.”

In addition, another of his companies has just completed a phase 3 human clinical trial on COVID-19 patients. ”We have worked hard to develop an AI-based drug to treat COVID-19 infections and in record time this has passed both phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials together with collaborators in Turkey. We are now busy trying to get this pharmaceutical candidate into the clinic to help patients to combat the disease.”

Among the lessons from the pandemic is the amount of collaborative work that can be done virtually, a trend Uhlén sees continuing after the virus is under control. “I used to travel abroad almost every week. This has of course now been replaced with no travel and virtual web-meetings,” he says. “Project meetings are now held exclusively virtually, making them in some ways more effective, but in other ways more boring.

“I am confident that we will be able to combat the next pandemic in a more prepared manner. Hopefully, this learning will also be fundamental to getting more resources to use science and technology to combat other world challenges, such as global warming.”

He also believes that the pandemic has taught us the agility of the research community to adapt to new challenges and to quickly develop tools for society to combat new threats. “I am confident that we will be able to combat the next pandemic in a more prepared manner. Hopefully, this learning will also be fundamental to getting more resources to use science and technology to combat other world challenges, such as global warming. Another issue of great importance is the problem associated with increased antibiotic resistance. Politicians should join forces more effectively with the research community to use science and technology to help in the important fight against these societal challenges.”

For the COVID pandemic, university labs were able to offer high testing capacity to the regions already in April 2020, but this capacity was not used until much later due to logistic problems, adds Uhlén. “There are many lessons learned from this, including the importance of flexible IT systems, without sacrificing the patient security.”

A thriving life science scene

Mathias Uhlén earned his PhD at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm in 1984. After a post-doc period at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, he became a professor in microbiology at KTH in 1988. He has also been a guest professor in Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet since 2018 and for ten years he was also a part time professor in biotechnology at the Danish Technical University (DTU), in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“I believe Denmark in the past have been better on the business side of biotechnology, partly due to the fact that large companies, such as Novo Nordisk, Lundbeck, Novozymes and Christian Hansen, have a base in Denmark, while many companies in Sweden have moved abroad.”

“It is interesting to compare the life science landscapes in Sweden and Denmark,” says Uhlén, “I believe Denmark in the past have been better on the business side of biotechnology, partly due to the fact that large companies, such as Novo Nordisk, Lundbeck, Novozymes and Christian Hansen, have a base in Denmark, while many companies in Sweden have moved abroad.”

However, in the last ten years both countries have a thriving life science scene and in Sweden this has been accompanied with a large number of new public companies, as exemplified with the recent IPO of the Uppsala company Olink at Nasdaq in March, 2021, he says.

”Life science companies have been able to succeed in Sweden largely because innovations at the universities are owned by the researcher.”

”Life science companies have been able to succeed in Sweden largely because innovations at the universities are owned by the researcher. This means that the innovations are driven by the innovators instead of university administrators,” Uhlén says. “In addition, it is relatively simple to start companies in Sweden, with few obstacles in the form of financial or administrative burdens. Finally, there is a lot of venture capital and a large number of public biotech companies making the Swedish environment competitive and thriving.”

When not working, Mathias Uhlén enjoys spending time with friends and family, which includes his partner and three grown daughters, listening to music, skiing and playing golf. When not relaxing at his home by the sea, shared with his partner, a dog, a cat and also home to a chicken farm, he relishes traveling and spending time outdoors, especially in the Swedish archipelago.

“During the years, I have worked with data and technology-driven research, and to my great satisfaction, this field of research is thriving both in biology and medicine.”

While almost all areas of science have stirred his curiosity throughout the years, the move into his focus areas was a combination of strategic and opportunistic decisions, he says. “During the years, I have worked with data and technology-driven research, and to my great satisfaction, this field of research is thriving both in biology and medicine.”

Photo: Jenny Öhman/Nordic Life Science