Pär Nordlund awarded the Prize for Innovation and Utilisation 2026
Pär Nordlund is an internationally prominent researcher who successfully combines excellence in basic research with tangible societal impact. By translating groundbreaking discoveries into successful companies, he has contributed to accelerating the development of new medicines and strengthening the link between academia and industry. He is now awarded the 2026 Prize for Innovation and Utilisation.
Pär Nordlund is an innovative and prolific researcher who translates his research into practical applications. By founding and developing companies such as Sprint Bioscience, Pelago Bioscience and DotBio, he has created platforms that make advanced technology in pharmaceutical research easier to use. His work has, in particular, contributed to new ways of identifying and testing potential drugs.
Sprint Bioscience is based on Pär Nordlund’s knowledge of how proteins are structured and function in the body. They also use a method known as fragment-based screening, in which small parts of molecules are tested to identify those that could become new drugs. Meanwhile, Pelago Bioscience is developing a technology called CETSA, which is used worldwide to investigate how drugs work in living cells.
Nordlund’s innovations have been of great significance both in research and in industry, and are used by many researchers and companies around the world.
By combining scientific curiosity with entrepreneurship, he sets an example of how academic research can contribute to tangible societal benefits and medical advances.
What does this award mean to you, Pär Nordlund?
“Very happy that I, my research group and the entrepreneurs and companies I have worked with have been recognised for innovation and social benefit. It has been very exciting journeys, and I am very grateful to have been a part of them. I also see it as a prize for protein research, which unfortunately is not always in focus. I see this as problematic, because proteins are key players in most processes in the body and are also targets for almost all drugs. I think we have shown the value of strong protein research both for understanding disease processes and for making medicines more efficient.”
What work are you involved in at the moment?
“We have developed CETSA technologies that not only make it possible to see that a drug binds to its target protein, but we can also follow what happens to thousands of proteins in the cell after the target protein has been hit. We call this pathway-CETSA, and with that technology we can understand the real action of drugs in the cell, what mechanism it needs to have to be effective, or if it seems to induce harmful mechanisms that can cause side effects. Pathway-CETSA is the first method that makes it possible to follow cellular processes in such detail, and we believe it will be very valuable in many steps of drug development as well as for basic studies of disease mechanisms.”
Justification from the prize committee
"Pär Nordlund is awarded the Karolinska Institutet Prize for Innovation and Utilisation 2026 for having demonstrated an outstanding ability to combine scientific excellence with entrepreneurship throughout his research career. He has thereby converted research from Karolinska Institutet into concrete societal benefit. By founding and developing successful companies such as Sprint BioScience and Pelago BioScience, he has enabled advanced technologies to reach both industry and academia.
His work has particularly contributed to accelerating the development of new drugs through innovative methods in structural biology and cell-based analysis. The CETSA technique which he co-developed, published in Science in 2013, is today a globally recognized tool in pharmaceutical research. The CETSA technology forms the basis of Pelago BioScience, which is currently operating at Campus Solna with over 50 employees and customers worldwide. Pär Nordlund is a role model for academic entrepreneurship and commerisialisation. He contributes inspiration and shares his expertise with several smaller companies that originated at KI.
In summary, Pär Nordlund’s long-term commitment and innovative power have had a significant impact both nationally and internationally."
About the prize
Starting in 2022 Karolinska Institutet awarded the Prize for Innovation and Utilisation. The prize is awarded to active researchers/research students (employed, adjunct or affiliated with KI).
If an individual cannot be considered to be behind the innovation on their own, a maximum of three people can share the prize.
Award winners will be recognized during the autumn inauguration ceremony.