CLRF was founded by Professor Kåre Larsson (1937-2018), Lund University and Dr.h.c. Gunnar Sandberg (1923-2007), GS Development, Malmö. Kåre Larsson was a world-leading expert on lipid structure and assembly with seminal work on fat crystallization and cubic liquid crystalline lipid phases. Gunnar Sandberg was a Swedish entrepreneur, who founded Electro-Sandberg, a major electric installation company in southern Sweden, and he later became involved in many forward-looking and innovative companies. Their collaboration began in the late 1980’s, with Kåre Larsson’s pioneering scientific discovery of cubic lipid liquid crystalline nanoparticles – Cubosomes, which applications were to be commercialized by Camurus AB. Today Camurus AB has emerged as one of Sweden’s leading life-science companies, listed on Nasdaq The Nasdaq Stockholm (MidCap) under the ticker “CAMX”.
Kåre at the left, Gunnar at the right. Picture taken in 1997.
In 1997, Kåre Larsson donated his Camurus shares, and Gunnar Sandberg donated a significant sum of money to form the Kåre Larsson and Gunnar Sandberg Research Foundation, which was given the English name Camurus Lipid Research Foundation, CLRF. This donation reflects the close friendship of Kåre Larsson and Gunnar Sandberg and their joint vision to multi-disciplinary research in lipid science, particularly focused at structure and function of complex systems and their roles and applications in biology and life science.
Gunnar Sandberg passed away in 2007. Kåre Larsson resigned as chairman of the foundation in 2016 and passed away in 2018. They were succeeded in the board by their sons Marcus Larsson and Per Sandberg.