Per Andrén studies molecules to answer life’s big questions

“I’ve had a very good start to my South African journey,” says Per Andrén, Professor of Mass Spectrometry Imaging, who has just returned to Sweden after six months in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Recently appointed Honorary Distinguished Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, he has been tasked with establishing the African continent’s first facility for mass spectrometry imaging (MSI). This trust is no coincidence. At his laboratory at Uppsala Biomedical Centre, Per has built one of the world’s foremost environments for large-scale molecular imaging.

“The first instrument is already installed in Johannesburg and there is a clear ambition to continue expanding. At the same time, we operate in a highly resource-intensive field where instruments cost millions. The rapid pace of development means that today’s cutting-edge technology can become outdated within just a few years. It requires constant updating and the financial capacity to invest at a very high level,” says Per, who now has 26 years of experience leading MSI facilities.

For Per, it was GE Healthcare, in collaboration with Uppsala University, that first opened the doors to Biomedical Centre in 2003. The international company was searching for someone to lead a new initiative in proteomics and had been recommended a Swedish researcher who had recently returned from a postdoc position at the UT Medical School at Houston. During his time in the laboratory of MSI pioneer Richard M. Caprioli, Per had contributed to the development of electrospray technology for proteomics, and the newly launched collaboration in Uppsala became the perfect next step.

“After completing my PhD on how antipsychotic drugs can cause involuntary movements, I was given the opportunity to work with mass spectrometry techniques in Caprioli’s laboratory. In Houston, I developed a strong interest in Parkinson’s disease, which has remained my main research focus ever since I established myself at Biomedical Centre. An intensive decade followed, during which I both built up the facility and travelled extensively to present our research around the world. It proved to be a worthwhile investment: in 2010 I was awarded a six-year Senior Researcher position funded by the Swedish Research Council, which in 2016 led to a professorship as well as several major grants for the acquisition of mass spectrometers.”

Today, the facility is internationally sought after, with a steady queue for the team’s services. This position led to Per and his group being recruited in 2021 to the SciLifeLab Spatial Biology platform. In collaboration with some of Sweden’s leading environments for cell and tissue analysis, they help academia and industry analyse molecular information in tissue. Together, they constitute a resource that has already contributed to several breakthroughs in the life sciences.

“Our involvement in SciLifeLab has been valuable from the very start. Here, we play a central role in innovative projects that generate important advances. Along the way, we continue to develop our MSI techniques while also making new discoveries in our own research through two Parkinson’s projects funded by the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Brain Foundation. One project aims to understand why some patients develop involuntary movements during chronic L-DOPA treatment. In the other, we are searching for biomarkers capable of distinguishing Parkinson’s disease from Lewy body dementia and Parkinson’s dementia. We have already published several important findings relating to Parkinson’s disease.”

A search in PubMed, the database for medical and biomedical literature, places the group at the forefront of international research. Over the past decade, Per Andrén and his team have led the studies behind 14 articles published in highly ranked journals, a majority of them within the Nature portfolio. In the Scopus database, Per has an h-index of 47, a level associated with "outstanding scientists who are likely to be found only at the top universities".

“Behind these achievements is a highly skilled and close-knit team. Several of our most significant studies have also been carried out in collaboration with outstanding researchers such as Per Svenningsson at Karolinska Institutet and Erwan Bezard at Université de Bordeaux. We are currently running a project funded by the Swedish Research Council in which we combine different omics technologies to develop tools capable of distinguishing diseases that resemble Parkinson’s disease. We already have promising data with the potential to enable earlier diagnosis and more accurate treatment decisions — advances that could ultimately improve quality of life for many people.”

At 69, Per Andrén has no plans to slow down. New grant applications are being prepared, work continues around the clock in the laboratory, and tomorrow he flies to Cambridge for discussions about potential new projects and collaborations. Many questions still remain unanswered, some more urgent than others.

“Twenty-six out of every 1,000 children in South Africa die before reaching the age of one, and in rural areas the proportion is significantly higher. And we do not know why. We need to identify the cause, and perhaps the hardest part is the realisation that if we were simply allowed to bring biopsy samples to Uppsala, we would probably come much closer to understanding what is behind the infant mortality. That is why it feels tremendously meaningful to help build their own MSI capacity, and I am already looking forward to my next trip to Johannesburg.”

Watch the film when our interns Hanna & Lovisa visit Lab Andrén

text: Magnus Alsne, photo: Mikael Wallerstedt a o