What the Science Needs Next
By Helena Strigård, CEO and Founder
September 1, 2026
Pelago Bioscience began with a method invented at Karolinska Institutet. Its growth into a drug discovery partner spanning biology and chemistry suggests that a founder’s work is not only to prove the science, but to keep finding the expertise that carries it further.
Michael Dabrowski describes his own contribution to the company he co-founded without mentioning the science.
“My contribution was knowing the need,” Pelago Bioscience’s CEO says. “And then selling it.”
It is a modest summary of a role that academic science rarely has enough of. Pelago Bioscience was founded in 2013 to commercialise the Cellular Thermal Shift Assay, CETSA®, developed from research at Karolinska Institutet. The method helps establish whether a compound engages a protein in a biologically relevant setting, including inside living cells — evidence about a fundamental step in how a potential medicine works.
Three people brought three different things to that beginning. Professor Pär Nordlund made the invention. Daniel Martinez Molina, then Nordlund’s postdoc and later the company’s Chief Scientific Officer, made it work in practice and Dabrowski understood who needed the answer and why they would pay for it.
None of the three could have delivered the company alone, and the way Dabrowski tells it, that was the point. For years, he and Martinez Molina worked as a pair: Dabrowski would identify and sell the work, Martinez Molina would design the laboratory process to deliver it.
The combination also brought different expectations into the same room. For an academic, Dabrowski observes, quality means arriving at the truth. For someone developing a drug, repeatability and traceability matter just as much. A company commercialising academic science needs both standards held at once, by people who genuinely hold them.
Thirteen years later, that pattern, identifying a capability the work requires, then going to find it, turns out to describe most of Pelago’s growth.
The expertise for scaling
The company grew profitably from its early beginnings, according to Dabrowski, and built up a decade of positive cash flow. Customers were paying for what it could do. By most measures, nothing needed fixing.
Looking back, he sees an opportunity that was available earlier.
“I think we could have scaled better and faster if we had brought in professionals earlier,” he says.
The expertise he means is specific, and it is not scientific: expanding capacity, automating laboratory work, building an international commercial organisation and carrying out an acquisition. Dabrowski puts the distinction plainly.
“We are life science experts,” he says. “We are not industrialists.”
That sentence is worth pausing on, because recognising it is a harder skill than it sounds. Nothing in Pelago’s results was telling the founders they had reached a limit. The signal had to come from their own reading of what the next stage would demand.
In August 2023, healthcare investor Impilo became Pelago’s largest shareholder, with all three founders remaining significant owners. Dabrowski describes what followed as capital and knowledge arriving together: investment in capacity and automation, and an international sales and marketing organisation. Recruiting in the United States was a step he felt more able to take with an experienced partner alongside him.
He is candid about the limits of what founders can reasonably be expected to know. Asked about executing an acquisition, he notes that his own background is in quantum physics.
“What do I know about acquiring a company?”
Technical help can be bought, he allows. Appetite for the risk is harder to source. In his account, the partnership supplied both the financing and the experience that made the next step practical.
The expertise the customer needed
The same question, turned outward, explains Pelago’s most recent move.
CETSA® establishes whether a molecule engages its target. That is valuable information, and for thirteen years it was the whole business. But a binding result is the beginning of a decision, not the end of one. Someone has to interpret it, propose a change to the molecule, and then make the next compound.
“It’s only a test,” Dabrowski says. “The innovation is the molecule.”
The capability Pelago lacked was medicinal chemistry. Rather than build it, the company went to people who had spent years developing it. The RG Discovery acquisition, announced in June 2026, brings medicinal chemistry and custom synthesis together with peptide chemistry, ADME and bioanalysis. RG Discovery was founded in 2011 by former AstraZeneca scientists, and its expertise is precisely the kind that takes a long time to accumulate.
The result is that design, synthesis, testing and interpretation can now run with one scientific partner.
“Now we can deliver the whole cycle,” Dabrowski says.
He is clear about where the fit is strongest: biotechs developing small molecules against novel intracellular targets, particularly proteins that are difficult to study by other means. These are programmes where evidence about what happens inside the cell can be especially useful in deciding what to make next. The companies range from small virtual teams with funding for a single programme to larger biotechs that need capacity for an additional project. For a small team, access to connected disciplines extends what it can attempt. For a larger one, it creates room to advance another idea.
Notably, Dabrowski frames the acquisition the same way he frames his own role at the founding, in terms of the need it answers rather than the capability it adds.
“Through the acquisition, we have a better value proposition for our customers,” he says.
Building the habit into the company
A founder can ask which expertise is missing. A company has to keep asking it, which is a different problem.
Pelago’s answer is structural. Technical sales identifies opportunities; project advisors work to understand the customer’s problem and represent it inside the company, with leadership explicitly accountable for customer success. The function exists to make sure someone’s job is the customer’s next decision rather than Pelago’s next invoice.
Dabrowski illustrates the thinking through curiosity, a value the company has long held. A scientist, he notes, might wish the customer were more curious about the method.
“Or we could be a little more curious about their problem,” he says.
The same instinct explains why he wants venture investors to understand the expanded offering. The ability to test a scientific hypothesis early and to establish quickly when it does not hold matters to the people funding a programme as well as to those running it.
Part of the job
There is a useful lesson here for founders whose businesses are already working. Success creates choices about how far to take a company. Recognising the expertise needed for the next stage becomes part of the founder’s job.
Pelago’s history reads as three versions of that same recognition. At the founding, the science needed someone who knew the need. At scale, it needed people who had industrialised a business before. To be genuinely useful to a customer’s programme, it needed chemists who could act on what the assay revealed.
None of those was a scientific problem, and none of them was solved by the founders alone. On the evidence of thirteen years, the question worth returning to is not only whether the science is good. It is what the science needs next, and who already knows how to provide it.