Karl L Mettinger, MD, PhD

The news on Monday morning of this week in late October 2026 was shocking. My colleague Kent, who resides in Stockholm, informed me that Karl Mettinger, MD, PhD, the Chairman and CEO of Cellastra, had passed away on Sunday. I was not surprised to receive a call from Kent as he and I were working on a presentation we hoped to give to potential investors in Hollywood in November. We planned to show Karl and other company executives our proposed appendix slides as they’d already seen the main presentation. I also was thinking about how to celebrate Karl’s upcoming birthday on 1 November (he was 10 years and a few days my senior). We immediately set out to inform other staff at Cellastra and to enact continuity plans. 

 

One of my first actions was to write a short obituary from the Cellastra prospective. Karl was one of the cofounders of this company along with Kent. In viewing the very short obituary posted by the funeral home about Karl, I decided to write this piece. Of course, it is written from my perspective and offers an incomplete story of this dynamic man. I could only retell some of the stories he told about his love for and support of music. I knew he was a religious man, and had a deep love for Christ. He told me often of his efforts to support and grow the Swedish language church in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our conversations often veered into topics other than science and medicine.

 

Karl was born in Sweden and I in Finland, so we shared some common European values, including a Pentecostal faith. I can’t tell you much of his childhood, only that he had a brother who served as a missionary in Thailand. He talked about his ex wife sometimes, usually bragging of her vocal musical skills. Karl received his medical degree from the University of Lund and a doctorate from the Karolinska Institute. His background was in hematology and neurology, but he was well versed in other areas of medicine. We often talked about diseases and potential novel ways to treat them, especially in neurological diseases, as neuroscience was a common background we shared. He always seemed more concerned about helping people than making a lot of money. That was a big reason I enjoyed working with him.

 

I first met Karl many years ago when I was consulting for Ivax on a pharmaceutical development project down in Miami. We didn’t work together on the first projects that I was down there for but did on another one many months later. One of our first projects together was to support a marketing application for Europe in Kaposi’s sarcoma in AIDS patients. The first reviewer assigned by the European medicines agency (EMA) was in Sweden, so Karl and I traveled to Uppsala to meet with the reviewer as well as England to meet with EMA. While our trip there was in late August and early September, it was quite warm in Sweden, and it took us a little while to figure out how to turn on the air-conditioning in the car. The hotel room, which was in a little city to the west of Stockholm, had no air-conditioning. The cathedral in Uppsala, a centuries old stone building, was wonderfully cool and inspiring. That particular drug application was approved, although we had quite a bit more work to do on it after getting back to the United States before and after submission.

 

Over the years, Karl and I work together on a few projects in Miami. Karl moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, but took a job with a company in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I ended up consulting for that company and visited Karl in Calgary on occasion, primarily working from my home in the Chicago area. Karl the took a position with SuperGen in Pleasanton, California and I ended up consulting with that company on several projects over several years. He told me he was founding Cellastra primarily to work with cell lines from Sweden for medical applications. It was a few years after that he invited me to accept a position as a Vice President. Since the company was self-funded, he offered stock options but no salary. We are hoping to follow his plans and secure funding to complete the proof of concept nonclinical studies and the other studies necessary to open an IND in the US and start human studies. I regret Karl will not be here to witness these events. Perhaps he is looking down from heaven, not surprised that I am writing another required document.

In loving memory, Hank