Jens Nielsen

Jens Nielsen is the CEO of BioInnovation Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark and Professor of Systems Biology at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. He is Adjunct Professor at the Technical University of Denmark. He is the most cited researcher in the field of metabolic engineering, and he is the founding president of the International Metabolic Engineering Society. Jens Nielsen is the founder of several biotech companies.
Education and academic career.
Nielsen has an MSc degree in Chemical Engineering and a PhD degree (1989) in Biochemical Engineering from the Danish Technical University (DTU). He took his dr.techn. degree also from DTU. Following his PhD degree he established his independent research group at DTU and was appointed full Professor there in 1998. He was Fulbright visiting professor at MIT in 1995–1996. At DTU he founded and directed Center for Microbial Biotechnology.
In 2008 he was recruited as Professor and Director to Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, where he built a research group of more than 60 people. At Chalmers he established the Area of Advance Life Science Engineering, a cross departmental strategic research initiative and was founding Head of the Department of Biology and Biological Engineering, which now encompass about 200 people.
Nielsen has published so far more than 700 research papers, co-authored more than 40 books and he is inventor of more than 50 patents. He was identified by Thompson Reuter/Clarivate as a highly cited researcher in 2015-2019, and according to Google Scholar he is the most cited researcher in Metabolic Engineering and top five in Synthetic Biology. He is co-author of several textbooks, and his textbook on Bioreaction Engineering Principles has been published in three editions and his textbook on Metabolic Engineering has been translated to both Chinese and Japanese.
In 2019 Jens Nielsen was recruited as CEO of BioInnovation Institute (BII), an initiative by the Novo Nordisk Foundation to support innovation and translation of science for use in society. BII support start-up companies financially and with business development, and operates an incubator that is open for early stage start-up companies in life science.
Research.
Nielsen has been studying and engineering metabolism for almost 30 years. His work has produced, among other, natural rare molecules, antibiotics and biofuels. The scope of this work is to be able to produce valuable compounds in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way that does not depend on petrol processing or extraction from endangered plant species. He is also using his unique approach and methods to study metabolism in humans, with specific interest in metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and various cancers.
Industrial microbiology.
Nielsen has worked on studying and improving many different industrial biotechnological processes. Initially he worked on physiological characterization of the filamentous fungus "Penicillium chrysogenum" that is used for penicillin production. This resulted in continued work, together with the Dutch company DSM, on development of a novel process for production of adipoyl-7-ADCA, a precursor for cephalexin. He also worked on characterization of many other fermentation processes used for antibiotics production, and through the use of his experimental and modelling techniques he assisted several companies with improving their production process. Nielsen also worked on improving fermentation processed used for production of industrial enzymes, both using fungi and bacteria.
Metabolic engineering.
In connection with his work on improving many classical and new fermentation processed Nielsen developed a number of experimental and computational tools that today is the foundation for metabolic engineering, the directed genetic modification of cells with the objective of improving the phenotype. He was the first to use gas-chromatography mass-spectrometry (GC-MS) as an experimental tool for measurement of C13-labelled metabolites with the objective to perform flux analysis. Through metabolic engineering Nielsen has developed and improved a number of biotechnological processes, e.g. 1) improved ethanol production by yeast and reduced glycerol formation as a by-product, 2) improved the temperature tolerance of yeast which has enabled ethanol production at elevated temperatures and thereby reduced costs, 3) production of a range of different chemicals using engineered yeast such as resveratrol, 3-hydroxypropionic acid, human haemoglobin, fatty acid ethyl esters, short chain fatty acids, alkanes, fatty alcohols, santalene, farnesene, coumaric acid and ornithine.
Systems biology of industrial microorganisms.
Nielsen has pioneered the development of systems biology tools for industrial microorganisms. He has developed genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) for many important industrial microorganisms, including yeast ("Saccharomyces cerevisiae"), "Lactococcus lactis", "Streptomyces coelicolor", "Aspergillus oryzae", "Aspergillus niger", "Penicilium chrysogenum" and "Pichia pastoris". Nielsen has also developed a number of tools for performing integrative omics analysis, and he was the first to demonstrate how transcriptome data could be integrated in the context of GEMs in order to gain insight into co-regulation. He has also developed methods for performing quantitative metabolome analysis of many microorganisms as well as he has been involved in genome-sequencing of several key industrial microorganisms.
Human metabolism.
Using his systems biology toolbox developed for microorganisms, Nielsen initiated work on human metabolism. In connection with this he developed a comprehensive genome-scale metabolic model for human cells and he was the first to use a human GEM to illustrate the metabolic heterogeneity of cancer metabolism. His work on human metabolism has involved studies of different diseases such as obesity, NAFLD and NASH, and hepatocellular carcinoma. Nielsen further used human GEMs to identify that combined measurements of several glycosaminoglycans can be used as a very strong biomarker for clear cell renal cell carcinoma, probably the first systems biomarker.
Gut microbiota.
Nielsen has also used his systems biology competence to study the metabolism of the gut microbiota. He was involved in early studies on using metagenome sequencing for characterization of the gut microbiota and demonstrate that variations are associated with cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. He also used his advanced metabolic modelling skills to gain further functional insight into how the gut microbiota impacts changes in plasma metabolomics in response to dietary changes.
Companies.
Nielsen founded Fluxome A/S that raised more than M20EUR in venture capital. This company metabolically engineered yeast for production of resveratrol and used this yeast for commercial production of this compound. This process was acquired by the company Evolva. Nielsen has founded several other biotech companies, including Metabogen AB, Biopetrolia AB and Elypta AB, and he has served in the scientific advisory board of a range of different biotech companies in the US and Europe.
Personal.
Nielsen is originally from Horsens in Denmark. He has a daughter named Anna-mathilde.