Pål Nyrén (born 1955) was, as of June 2009, a biochemistry professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. He is known for having developed the pyrosequencing method for DNA sequencing.
Early life and education
Pål Nyrén was born 1955. After undergraduate training, he received an M.S. in Chemical Engineering, in 1981, from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), in Stockholm, Sweden. He then completed a Ph.D. in Biochemistry, at the University of Stockholm, in 1985, with a dissertation entitled, "The Proton Pumping Pyrophosphatase From Rhodospirillum rubrum." He did a post-doctoral fellowship under John Walker at the MRC's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, from 1985-1986.
Career
As Nyrén has stated at his faculty web page (as of June 2009),, he has held the following academic posts:"1988 Associate professor (Docent) Biochemistry University of Stockholm"[;]"1999 Professor in Biochemistry, KTH, Stockholm"[.]
He also lists himself as "[f]ounder of the company Biotage AB (former Pyrosequencing AB)" in 1997, which is more accurately stated as his participating in the founding of a pyrosequencing unit, with other academics at KTH, a unit once a part of the complex set of businesses of Biotage AB created through mergers and acquisitions, with that pyrosequencing unit having been sold off to Qiagen in 2008.In detail, Biotage AB actually arose, per its company description, from a series of events beginning with the 1969 founding by Colin Jones of Jones Chromatography (in Wales); the much later (1989) founding by Sheridan Snyder of Biotage LLC for "systems for drug discovery and purification" in the U.S.; the 1994 foundings of Argonaut Technologies by Larry Bock and Joel Martin in the U.S. and of Personal Chemistry (originally Labwell), in Stockholm, Sweden (a microwave synthesis startup), by Sharon Stone-Elander and Sören Nygren; the 1997 founding of Pyrosequencing AB, in Uppsala, Sweden, "specializing in developing instruments for sequencing DNA strands and building on technique developed at The Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, Stockholm" (with Stockholm IPO, 2000); the 2000 founding of MIP Technologies in Lund, Sweden by Christine Berggren and Kees Ensing; Argonaut's acquisition of Jones in 2002, Pyrosequencing's acquisitions of Biotage and Personal Chemistry in 2003, and the renaming of the conglomerate as Biotage AB at that time. Biotage AB went on to acquire Argonaut in 2005 and MIP in 2010, the latter only after, in 2008, having sold to Qiagen the "biosystems branch of Biotage AB and the Pyrosequencing brand" (the latter the unit possibly co-founded by title subject Pål Nyrén, and Mostafa Ronaghi [in re: the latter, see Bornstein & Illumina (4 August 2008), op. cit.]). Note, see Biotage Staff (28 October 2025), op. cit.: the name "Pål Nyrén" does not appear on the Biotage AB history page, despite that page being rich with the names of founders of Biotage's component businesses. This historical summary is otherwise drawn entirely from
Recognition In 2013, Nyrén was awarded the European Patent Office's European Inventor Award, in the SMEs category.
Further reading
References