Co-founder & COO at Atum

​As ATUM’s Co-Founder and CCO, Dr. Gustafsson oversees the company's external communications and strategic growth. Prior to co-founding ATUM in 2003, Dr. Gustafsson led, managed and collaborated with key strategic teams at Maxygen (1998-2002). Before Maxygen, Dr. Gustafsson worked as a scientist at Kosan Biosciences, a number of research, teaching, and postdoctoral positions at UC's Santa Cruz and San Francisco, and at University of Umeå. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology/Biochemistry from the University of Umeå, Sweden in 1992.

Despite a global pandemic, economic hardship, social unrest, and massive California fires, 2020 stands out as one of the best years ever for biotech. The rapid increase of biotech valuation was prominent both here in California and across the world. Biotech IPOs, SPACs, Venture Capital and Private Equity all had record breaking years. This is partly due to the ongoing transformation of the pharmaceutical industry from a chemistry- to a biology-based engineering discipline. The other part of the sudden biotech valuation leap came from the realization of how profoundly affected our modern society is from diseases such as the COVID-19 pandemic and how fast the biotech industry generated diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines to address pandemic needs. ATUM is an integrated provider for high value bioengineering services in the global pharmaceutical supply chain and the presentation on April 7 2020 summarized how this last year changed the value proposition.​

​Theme: Swedish Life Science