NLS Profiles

Imagine your job involves meeting with entrepreneurs and researchers who are passionate about developing drugs that could transform or save lives, and realizing you could be part of that future. That is just another “day at the office” for Ester Sklarsky, who has been a principal for the Swedish venture capital firm Sound Bioventures for the past three and a half years.

Professor Ed Boyden has developed expansion microscopy but his research expands beyond this discovery, for example into the exciting field of optogenetics.

Despite international turbulence and news of life sciences and research funding disruptions in the U.S., investment in innovative life sciences projects continues, according to Mala Valroy, an investment manager with Industrifonden, one of Sweden’s largest evergreen venture capital (VC) funds. 


For Sirpa and Markku Jalkanen of Finland, M.D. and Ph.D., married, immunotherapy researchers, working together came as naturally as a courtship.

Victor Ambros, Professor of Molecular Medicine and the Silverman Chair in Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, is one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

More than three decades after their discovery of microRNA, Professor Gary Ruvkun received the “mythic call” from Stockholm to learn that he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside his erstwhile colleague Victor Ambros.