The Swedish Research Award 2017 has been awarded to Professor Mathias Uhlen by the foundation Research!Sweden. On the September 25th Mathias Uhlen will receive the award for research accomplishments regarding mapping of human proteins within the Human Protein Atlas. The mission of the Research!Sweden foundation is to raise awareness regarding the importance of medical research - for health and prosperity by honoring every year one researcher or politician with the award.

Anna Nilsson Vindefjärd general secretary of Research!Sweden motivates the nomination "Mathias Uhlén's research is extremely valuable both for today and future precision medicine. It has already resulted in a number of clinical applications in several major public diseases, including cardiovascular disease, cancer and infectious disorders". The award also highlights basic research achievements translated to clinical practice and benefit for patients such as the Pathology Atlas and the results regarding genes involved in cancer .

The Human Protein Atlas (HPA) is a Swedish-based program started in 2003 with the aim to map of all the human proteins in cells, tissues and organs using integration of various omics technologies, including antibody-based imaging, mass spectrometry-based proteomics, transcriptomics and systems biology. All the data in the knowledge resource is open access to allow scientists both in academia and industry to freely access the data for exploration of the human proteome.

The version 17 (launched August 17, 2017) consists of three separate parts, each focusing on a particular aspect of the genome-wide analysis of the human proteins; the Tissue Atlas showing the distribution of the proteins across all major tissues and organs in the human body, the Cell Atlas showing the subcellular localization of proteins in single cells, and finally the new Pathology Atlas showing the impact of protein levels for survival of patients with cancer.

The Human Protein Atlas program has already contributed to several thousands of publications in the field of human biology and disease and it was recently (July 2017) selected by the organization ELIXIR as a European core resource due to its fundamental importance for a wider life science community.

Cristina Al-Khalili Szigyarto