Hanna Sundström

“I have a very Finnish love of silence.

My inner happy place is sitting at the pier of our summer house on an island in Finland waiting for the sauna to heat up and just enjoying the silence of that moment.

It’s those quiet moments that spurred on my love of science. I remember moments during my PhD when I was in the lab, everybody else had already gone, and being there in the quiet, empty corridors with my experiment running and eagerly waiting to see how it will end up this time.

I had this curiosity from the very beginning. When I was young, I was always observing things like animals and plants and creating little worlds, like ant farms. I love biology, chemistry, and maths. And I have a big love for maps.

I’ve always been driven by this desire to discover something myself, something new, something unknown. It's much easier to read about something than to be there to discover it yourself. Curiosity is essential in science and research. You need to have the curiosity to not just look behind the first stone but turn over the next stone too.

At CSL, I help guide promising new therapies through sometimes quite complicated regulatory and clinical pathways so these medicines can reach the patients who need them. I translate the science into something that health authorities can assess and ultimately approve as a new medicine for patients.

If it’s a therapy in early development, for example, all the different teams – regulatory, clinical, safety, commercial, and many more – come together and make a plan to develop the medicine. My role is to work with health authorities to see if they find our plan acceptable, and then we adjust it as needed.

I really love the intersection between science, strategy, and collaboration. I'm a people person, and it’s rewarding when different teams bring their expertise together and solve these complex puzzles. It really energises me!

One thing I'm particularly proud of from my days in the lab is being part of the team discovering a molecule, which is currently under development for iron overload diseases. I followed the molecule from the lab to regulatory affairs, where I work now. For most scientists, it’s a once in a life-time chance to see a compound make it all the way from the lab to clinical trials.

One of the hardest lessons science teaches you is that effort doesn’t always equal the outcome. There have been times that we needed to let go of experiments or research directions that we’d invested a lot of time in. If something isn’t working, you need to change course and create new opportunities. The low hanging fruit are all already gone, but that also builds resilience. If it was easy, then anybody would do it. And that just feeds my curiosity even further.

I hope that the scientific community can continue to close the gap between early scientific discovery and real patient impact so that we can move even faster to create more targeted treatments for conditions that have limited options, or others where there are still no therapies. It’s very humbling and grounding, and it really brings perspective to what we do. And it’s something I think about often, with all the deadlines and the complexity of what we do. It becomes so meaningful, when we remember why we do this.

Personally, I always keep a positive mindset. There is always a solution that will take us forward. And when we come together as a team, there is nothing we can't do.”