Ove Öhman receives prize as a bridge-builder between research and innovation

The citation states that Ove Öhman “has been a bridge-builder between academia and the business sector for several decades and has helped strengthen Uppsala’s innovation environment.”

In collaboration with companies and researchers in Uppsala, he has built up a technology that has been successfully used for purposes such as protein analysis and for rapidly determining which type of antibiotic should be used for different bacteria.

“The common theme is microfluidics and doing really tiny things – a kind of plumbing on a small scale,” Öhman explains.

From silicon to plastic

Ove Öhman came to Uppsala in the 1980s with a Master of Science Degree in Engineering from Linköping University. He obtained a job at Pharmacia’s spin-off company Biacore, which was developing new technology for protein analysis. Öhman’s mission was to see whether semiconductor technology could also be used to channel fluids, not just electrons.

He registered for a course in micromechanics at Uppsala University and began to etch patterns in silicon wafers for microscopic experiments, a technology known as microfluidics. Fairly soon, he and his colleagues realised that it would be better to use plastic materials, which are less fragile and cheaper. The inspiration came from an unexpected direction.

“I was reading an article in the magazine Ny Teknik about how a CD is manufactured and I saw that this plastic disc looked more or less like the silicon wafer I was etching. I thought, if I use the same process, perhaps I can produce the pattern in plastic instead,” Öhman recalls.

Inspiration from CD technology

Öhman called the world-leading producer of equipment for compact discs, Toolex Alpha in Sundbyberg, and explained that he wanted to produce patterns in CDs that could be used for purposes such as separating DNA. “How exciting, come and see us,” was the reply.

“It wasn’t really that easy to get it to fit in their machine. But I put some effort into getting it to work,” Öhman says.

After the first test in the machine, which was done in 1989, he had 300 discs to take home with him. That was the start of many years of work to develop and refine the technology.

Close collaboration with researchers

For a few years, Öhman worked full-time at Toolex, where he developed fundamental processes for DVD manufacturing. However, he has spent most of his professional life in the biotechnology sector, often engaged in close collaboration with researchers at Uppsala University.

Having started at Biacore, he moved on to an exploratory research division at Pharmacia, before launching his own company Åmic, established in 1998.

The focus throughout has been on advanced micro and nano systems and on building laboratory equipment in which the channels can be as narrow as less than a micrometre. The researchers he has worked with include Professors Karin Caldwell, Jan-Åke Schweitz, Ulf Landegren, Masood Kamali-Moghaddam and Johan Elf.

One example is the company Astrego Diagnostics, which was bought up in 2022 by the Japanese company Sysmex, where the collaboration resulted in an innovation in rapid bacterial diagnostics that won an international prize.

Low-cost precision

In 2003, Ove Öhman was rewarded with the Polhem Prize and in 2004 he received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University as a “pioneer in the area of micromechanics and microsystems technology in polymer materials”. His success is due in part to his choice of material.

“It’s possible to achieve the same precision as with silicon but it costs next to nothing. These are consumables. With normal CD production equipment, you can manufacture as many as 30,000 discs per day,” Öhman says.

Another major advantage of the microscopic lab equipment is that you only need tiny samples. One of the first commercial products, from the company Gyros, for example, analyses protein patterns in children, from whom only limited blood samples can be taken.

Creates favourable conditions

Many companies now use the technology. On a farm outside Uppsala, Öhman has built a barn in which he has collected the technology needed, and companies he works with today use the equipment. One example is Readily AB, which grew out of Dr Liza Löf’s COVID research and develops rapid tests for infectious diseases. This is just one of a series of companies that have benefited from his technical expertise and thorough industrial experience.

Through his ability to combine practical engineering expertise with business understanding, he has created conditions that enable research-based ideas to be developed into functioning products and sustainable businesses.

“A great many companies around the world now use this format. It feels pleasing to have been involved and contributed in various ways, but my contribution is just one small piece of the big picture. You need an application, smart chemistry and creative people as well to get products to work.”

Annica Hulth