* - Mathias Uhlen is Professor of Microbiology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. Dr Uhlen is member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science (IVA), the Royal Swedish Academy of Science (KVA) and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). He is Vice-President of the European Proteomics Association (EuPA) and member of the Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) council. He was Vice-President of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), responsible for external relations, from 1999 to 2001 and he was the chairman of the Swedish Biochemical and Molecular Biology Society (SFMB) from 1994 to 1999. Dr Uhlen has more than 280 publications in bioscience with the focus on the development and use of affinity reagents in biotechnology and biomedicine.

In the early eighties, Dr Uhlen cloned and characterized staphylococcal protein A, which is now used extensively for purification of antibodies both in diagnostics and therapy. He showed in 1983, for the first time, the principle of affinity capture of fusion proteins. The use of affinity tags for purification of recombinant proteins are now widely used in bioscience. In the late eighties, Uhlen published the use of magnetic micro spheres with streptavidin for automated solid phase applications. Such laboratory systems based on streptavidin beads are at present frequently used both in research and diagnostics. In the 90’ies, his group described a new principle for affinity reagents, called Affibodies, and showed their use as research tool and recently as potential cancer therapeutics. Uhlen and colleagues also developed a new strategy for DNA analysis called Pyrosequencing, a method that has recently been further developed by a US company (454) into a highly parallelized sequencing instrument.

Dr Uhlen is currently working on the Human Protein Atlas (HPA) program, with the aim to systematically map the human proteome. In October 2006, version 2.0 of the Protein Atlas was published (www.proteinatlas.org) with more than 1.2 million high-resolution images representing 1,359 human proteins. He has founded several companies, including Pyrosequencing AB (Biotage AB), Affibody AB, SweTreeGenomics AB, Magnetic Biosolutions AB, Creative Peptides AB and Atlas Antibodies AB. He has received numerous awards, including The Svedberg prize in 1992, the Göran Gustavsson prize in 1993, the gold medal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 2004, the Most Noble Order of the Seraphim - the Order of His Majesty the King in 2004, the Jerker Porath award and the Akzo Nobel Award in 2005 and the HUPO Distinguished Achievement Award in 2006.