Ellenberg interviewed by Sweden’s leading business newspaper
SciLifeLab’s Director Jan Ellenberg was recently interviewed by Sweden’s leading business newspaper, Dagens Industri. In the article, which was headlined “The life science lab expands”, Ellenberg discussed what makes SciLifeLab stand out, “Bringing together all the different groundbreaking technologies with data and AI expertise to enable advanced life science, as SciLifeLab has done, is unique,” he told the newspaper.
“No other European country has done it the way Sweden has. And it really creates opportunities to do things that a single research lab or university cannot do.”
Ellenberg, who is former head of department at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, where he led the work to build up several of Europe’s most successful interfaces between research and industry, is now applying this experience to his new strategy for SciLifeLab.
Ellenberg continued, “We want to expand our collaboration with industry and make our services and technologies available to more industrial users. We currently have a Vinnova-funded project that supports us in offering faster access to our services for industrial projects, as well as a different way of evaluating these projects and providing support and advice. Industry naturally has specific requirements in terms of confidentiality and protection of intellectual property rights, but also robustness and speed, sometimes to a greater extent than in academic research.”
The article reported that in total, SciLifeLab has over 1,900 unique users, of whom 1,640 come from academia and more than 150 from industry, spread across approximately 4,500 research projects. In addition to increased interaction with industry, the new strategy also includes a special focus on AI and precision medicine.
“We are currently expanding in two areas, one of which is data science. We have formulated a new data and AI strategy since I took up my position as director. We have also received a generous increase in our government funding for our national infrastructure. We are now using part of this increase to really launch a new generation of integrated data services across our entire infrastructure.”
To this end, Ellenberg said that SciLifeLab will hire between 20 and 25 data analysts this year. However, data science in life science is a sought-after expertise, the newspaper noted.
“But SciLifeLab has an advantage here, as we can advertise all these positions together in a large, high-profile campaign. We also hope to benefit from the unfortunate situation in the US labor market at the moment, where some of these experts may be finding it difficult to find jobs in the US. Hopefully, we can attract some of that talent to Sweden.”
One challenge when it comes to attracting foreign talent is the Swedish salary level, something that the Swedish system really should try to address, according to Jan Ellenberg.
The article reported that the second area that SciLifeLab wants to expand significantly is bringing new technologies to healthcare for greater benefit.
Ellenberg elaborated, “We have done this successfully in genome sequencing. Now we really want to do this on a broad scale to help healthcare with better diagnostics, better treatment choices, and also improve drug development in the future.”
Finally, Ellenberg discussed the physical expansion in Solna, as SciLifeLab is taking over the premises of the pharmaceutical company Sobi, thereby gaining 50 percent more space.
“Today, we use two of the three oval buildings here on campus, Alpha and Gamma. But soon we will also have a third, Beta.”
Read the full article in Swedish here.
