40 years with Åke Öberg and biomedical engineering

For 40 years, Linköping has been able to flaunt Sweden’s largest department of biomedical engineering. The department is also one of Europe’s largest, with world-class research and excellent results in the form of both awards and a large number of medical technology products sold and used worldwide. Åke Öberg has been there from the start.

“The tax revenues from the company Perimed alone – which was started based on a blood flow meter we developed – would have covered the funding for operations at the institute,” says Öberg, LiU’s first professor of Biomedical Engineering and an important part both of building up the institution and of the history of LiU.

Let’s start at the beginning: on 1 July, 1972, Öberg started his job as Professor of Biomedical Engineering at what at the time was Linköping College, with three faculties – Technology, Medicine, and Philosophy. He was brought over from Uppsala University, where since 1964 he had been studying things such as how arterial blood pressure is regulated in the heart and other organs – as the only engineer in the research group. He earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg.

At Linköping, his work got off to a flying start.

“They had started teaching courses for students by the spring of 1972. I got a room and a telephone in b-building, so it was just a matter of hiring people while the students pestered us about their course needs,” Öberg remembers.

Another professor, Ove Wigertz, was hired on 1 January, 1973.

“We’d managed to become five or six people and had plenty of money. In today’s money, we had around SEK 16 million a year in free research funds. There were great opportunities to test free ideas, which gave us early results to report on when we sought grants. There was a lot of work, but there was pleasure and enthusiasm in constructing something new. We had a lot of fun,” he says.

Coming to Linköping from rigid Uppsala was also a plus.

“Coming here was fantastic; it was so easy to work here compared with Uppsala, where there were barriers from the 1700s.”

After a short time, in March 1974, Öberg and the others moved to Biomedical Engineering – not just organisationally but physically as well, from b-building on Campus Valla to a newly-constructed building for the Faculty of Medicine in the hospital area. It’s something that even today is surprisingly unusual, even internationally, and is one of the faculty’s greatest strengths:

“We’re part of the Linköping Institute of Technology. We train engineers and conduct research in the field of biomedical engineering, but in close collaboration with clinical reality. We take needs from the clinic, bring them in to our laboratories, and then return the results directly to the clinical work in a rolling cycle,” explains Göran Salerud, professor and deputy head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Early on, Öberg saw the significance of conducting research close by to the clinic. He made several study trips to the United States and Japan, and also invited one of the States’ foremost researchers in the area, Robert F. Rushmer from the University of Washington, Seattle, to come visit. After holding some 25 seminars at the hospital, Rushmer left behind a report where he identified a number of pressing areas for research. 

“His work created a great many contacts across faculty boundaries,” Öberg recalled.

The Government Offices of Sweden saw early on that technology and medicine belonged together. As far back as 1968, there was a proposal to the Riksdag that a unit for medical research and education should be located at Linköping. In 1960 such a unit was established.

“Biomedical engineering forms the foundation for Linköping University,” stated Vice-Chancellor Helen Dannetun in connection with the department’s 40th anniversary celebrations.

In 1970 Linköping College was formed with an engineering, a medical, and a philosophical faculty. The fact that there was both an engineering and a medical faculty – and an important bridge between them in addition – was also probably to Linköping’s advantage when the country’s seventh university was to be located: Linköping University was founded in 1975.

Only two years later, in 1977, the first PhD student – Gert Nilsson – defended his thesis; gradually he also became a professor (now professor emeritus) in the department.

“His thesis dealt with the transport of water through the skin; it was research that led to the development of an instrument which could help measure how much water artificial skin transports, and how much had to be replaced. The technology had great significance for the care of burn victims, who lose a great deal of water, and for the care of newborns and premature births,” Öberg says.

The next PhD student, now Professor Per Asp, was interested in the ears, nose, and throat, taking early measurements of strength and pressure in the oesophagus. His manometer, which measures pressure and pH in the oesophagus and stomach, is today world-leading technology that also became the foundation of the biomedical engineering company Synetics AB.

But the biggest commercial success may still come from the field where Öberg once wrote his thesis, and which today is one of the spearheads of the department: how blood flow can be measured optically, and how the regulation of blood and what’s known as microcirculation – that is, how blood flows and is regulated in the smallest and thinnest vessels in the human body – can be studied.

“I became interested in this at a conference in Ottawa in 1976, and decided to learn more in order to be able to start research here at home. Gert Nilsson started with this and came up with a machine that could measure the blood flow in very small vessels optically.”

The blood flow meter became the foundation for what is now the company Perimed, with 65 employees and operations in large parts of the world.

“I left the company first, and then Gert did; being an entrepreneur, researcher, and teacher at the same time was too difficult. But what I thought was exciting in Ottawa in 1976 is still one of our strongest areas of research, and our publications are frequently cited,” Öberg says.

He thinks entrepreneurship is important and the entire field is entrepreneurial in nature, but from the beginning it was not the goal to clone off a business, nor is it today, even if it is an inevitable feature when new, useful and sought-after technology is constantly developed – like a method for quickly sewing up microscopic vessels, an optical dialysis monitor that shows how well the kidneys have been cleansed during dialysis, methods for measuring brain activity with fibre optics – used for things such as Parkinson’s disease, an intelligent stethoscope, and much more.

Over the years, the power of innovation and entrepreneurship has resulted in a number of awards from Vinnova and other grantors; the results of research have been commercialised and refined in at least ten new companies; and many more innovations have been patented and transferred to multinational businesses like 3M and Synectics Medical.

New areas of research have gradually grown at the department: there is now a large group in medical imaging around CMIV, under the leadership of Professor Hans Knutsson; another important area is neurotechnology with Professor Karin Wårdell as the leading researcher.

Öberg is today 76 years old and has been professor emeritus for more than ten years, but is still highly active on the boards of biomed engineering centre formations and of the Mjärdevi company Biooptico. Also, he teaches a postgraduate course. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and several foreign academies and biomed engineering associations.

What does he wish for the future?

He replies quickly:

“A larger portion of free research funds that aren’t tied to a special project. That would increase creativity. It’s important to have the opportunity to test a wild idea every now and then.  

I’d also wish for greater international exchanges on an individual level; the young people here need to go out into the world to get established, life-long research contacts. It may feel difficult to go abroad when you have children, a dog, and a summer house, but it gives more in exchange than they would think.”

Monica Westman Svenselius (01 March 2013)

Photo: Göran Billeson (in the picture at the bottom, Åke Öberg is in conversation with Neda Haj-Hosseini, a newly-minted doctor in the department)