Katarina Alenäs, SVP Chromatography Nanologica AB
Who is Katarina Alenäs?
I have a M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering and a B.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Sciences and have spent most of my professional career within chromatography which is an area very close to my heart. Before joining Nanologica, I was the Country General Manager at Agilent Technologies Sweden, and before that I have been Product Manager Shimadzu HPLC/LCMS and I started my career as a Development Engineer of silica-based packing media for preparative chromatography at Kromasil.
What are you responsible for at Nanologica?
I joined Nanologica in March 2022 with the assignment of leading our business area Chromatography. My main responsibilities are leading the sales and application team in commercializing our products within preparative chromatography, NLAB Saga®. Since launching NLAB Saga® earlier this year, we are working intensely on attracting customers in order to secure supply agreements. I am also part of Nanologica’s management team, thus involved in refining the overall strategy and business plans for the company.
What is your current focus?
We initiated the launch of NLAB Saga® before the summer and the launch and promotion continues with several conferences during the fall. The sales team is in close dialogues with several potential customers, and our application team is advancing more customers in the different stages of evaluating our silica. The goal is to be included in the customer’s production process and secure agreements for delivery of silica for their production of insulin and other peptide-based drugs.
What do you look forward to?
In August we announced that we had received an order from one of the largest insulin manufacturers in the world for the evaluation of our silica at full production scale. We are eagerly awaiting the outcome of the evaluation, which will likely still take some time. However, if it turns out well, things can get really interesting.
How does this contribute to Nanologica’s vision of better and cheaper medicine through porous silica?
There are more than 500 million people worldwide with diabetes, the majority living in low-and middle-income countries, and the number of patients is expected to double in many of these countries in the next 25 years. It is a huge challenge to make insulin available to this number of patients, as it is expensive to produce. Our products help the Biopharmaceutical industry to lower these production costs. Therefore, we play an important role in making insulin and other diabetes drugs cheaper and more readily available for patients in need – ultimately we can save lives.