The Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco and Silicon Valley is pleased to welcome the biotech industry vanguard ATUM to the network. Headquartered just outside San Francisco in Newark, California, ATUM offers an integrated pipeline of tools, including gene design, optimization and synthesis, expression vectors, protein, and cellular engineering and production platforms. The company exploits the dependence of biological activity on well-designed sequences. ATUM’s tools and solutions fuel the transformation of biology from discovery science to an engineering discipline. By collaborating with their clients, ATUM accelerates breakthroughs and moves research further.
ATUM Co-founder and Chief Executive, Dr. Claes Gustafsson, received his Ph.D. in Biology/Biochemistry from the University of Umeå in Sweden. Over the years, the company has been working with leading Swedish Academic scientists Prof Bengt Mannervik at Uppsala University and Prof Per-Olof Syren at The Royal Academy of Sciences to improve protein engineering technologies. Each summer, ATUM hosts interns from the Bioengineering program at the Chalmers University of Technology to provide the Swedish students with insight into the commercial biotech experience and the warm Californian sun.
Since ATUM’s inception 17 years ago, the company has specialized in transforming minute biological building blocks into synthetic genes and proteins. The bioengineers at ATUM work meticulously in their operations to avoid any genetic errors or instability in synthesis. By brilliantly coalescing machine learning and statistical modeling, ATUM’s bioengineers deliver novel protein structures that help feed people, cure diseases, and combat waste worldwide.
As the world confronts the COVID-19 pandemic, ATUM has recalibrated operations to supply researchers with key cellular pieces to developing coronavirus antibody tests, drugs, and vaccine candidates. Dr. Gustafsson remarked in a San Francisco Chronicle Article that initially, as the global economy ebbed, he assumed ATUM’s operations would come to a “screeching halt.” To his pleasant surprise, the contrary was the case, and new clients came along, actually doubling the company’s operations. ATUM has mastered the engineering of spike-shaped proteins and antibodies that neutralize the virus, enabling scientists and researchers at various esteemed organizations to develop breakthrough tests and therapies in the safest, most efficient way possible. ATUM’s presence during the pandemic reaffirms the prolific, yet often underrecognized, biotech industry in the Bay Area.
“We’re proud to have a company as ATUM in our network. Seeing what they do at the forefront of bio-science is impressive and fantastic how they adapted productions to be part of the COVID-19” pandemic” solution.
Mats Andersson, Executive Director of SACC-SF/SV.
