Jan is a serial entrepreneur involved with numerous start-ups in the field of biotech. Jan is a native Dane, and did his Ph.D. at the University of Copenhagen in plant molecular biology.
After leaving academia, he built a distribution company specialized in molecular biology/cell culture reagents in Denmark (Sold to Fisher Scientific in 2002). Had Sales Manager tenures with Invitrogen and Roche Diagnostics, before moving on to co-found InMold Biosystems, a company in the advanced laboratory plastics area allowing to mould functional proteins into plastic surfaces. After that he spent a year in India working for Bangalore Genei, leaving the company, as it was sold to Merck Millipore, for a position as Managing Director of ArcticZymes in Tromsø, Northern Norway. Moved on to found Barentzymes in 2013, and the Njorth Bio_group in 2015/16. Since 2019 in Sweden and now a majority owner of CoronaDx – developing a Point of Care SARS-CoV-2 test system.
Jan has experience from listed companies, and has been running companies with multi-
country offices and feels inspired by taking products rooted in biotech research to the market.
Jan was chairman for the Industrial Biotech Network Norway adding to his international network in the developing bioeconomy stage and was member of the program board for the largest biotechnology program (Biotek2021) at the Norwegian Research Council. He is on the board of MABIT (a small North-Norwegian research fund), and functions as expert on research programs at the Norwegian Research Council and the EU biotech programmes under Horizon2020. Jan has been on the board of a long range of biotech start-up companies.
He has been invited speaker at many international conferences on industrial biotechnology.