Bustin was expert advisor to TATAA Biocenter founded in 2001 by Mikael Kubista, Anders Ståhlberg and Neven Zoric as excellence center in quantitative PCR. In 2021 Care Equity, controlled by investor Peter Batesko, invested in TATAA Biocenter. To facilitate the investment, a new holding company, Bioholdings LP, was established to acquire TATAA. During restructuring connected to TATAA’s COVID-19 testing business, following lawyers' instructions, the founders carried out an upstream merger between two holding entities. Peter Batesko, General Partner of Care Equity, claimed it violated a clause in an agreement and refused to register their ownership. In June 2023 Batesko dismissed Kubista as CEO and forfeited the founders' shares without compensation. Peter Batesko and companies he controls then sued Kubista, the TATAA founders, their lawyer and sent warning letters to the former advisors in what is claimed to be aggressive SLAPP.[7] As of October 2025, legal proceedings related to the merger dispute remain ongoing in the Swedish courts.
Research
His research group’s general areas of interest are the small and large bowel, as well as colorectal cancer with particular emphasis on investigating the process of invasion and metastasis. An important aim is to translate molecular techniques into clinical practice by including molecular parameters into clinical tumor staging.[8] To this end, Bustin has published many papers on PCR techniques,[9][10] in particular reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, the subject of his most cited paper, published in 2000.[11]
Bustin led a group of opinion leaders including Mikael Kubista, who developed the MIQE guidelines in a 2009 paper published in Clinical Chemistry,[12] the goal of which is to create guidelines for how PCR should be performed to ensure that PCR results are being reliably conducted and interpreted, as well as to make replication of experiments easier. This paper is the fifth most cited one ever to be published in Clinical Chemistry,[13][14] with over 17000 citations on Google Scholar as of September 2025.[15] Bustin was scientific advisor to and shareholder in TATAA Biocenter until it was taken over by Care Equity and his ownership was revoked without compensation.[16]
Testimony
Autism omnibus trial
Bustin testified on behalf of the Department of Justice in the autism omnibus trial about what he stated was the unreliability of the O'Leary lab's results with regard to testing for contamination. The lab had claimed to find measles virus in the intestines of children with developmental disorders.[17] Bustin describes his conclusions with regard to the lab's alleged detection of measles virus RNA as follows: "My clear conclusion then was that O'Leary's results were caused by defective experimental technique and inappropriate interpretation of results, since he was detecting DNA, and measles virus does not exist as DNA."[18][19] Bustin was described as "one of the most highly qualified and credible expert witnesses I [the Special Master] have ever encountered."[4] In addition to his testimony, Bustin published an analysis of Andrew Wakefield's 2002 study, which had been published in the journal Molecular Pathology. This analysis, like Bustin's testimony, concluded that "The only conclusion possible is that the assays were detecting contaminating DNA. Since MeV is an RNA-only virus and never exists in DNA form, these data must be ignored and it is my opinion that the authors should withdraw this publication from the peer-reviewed literature."[20]
Lundy murders
Bustin testified in the trials pertaining to the Lundy murders in 2015, criticizing tests that had claimed to detect human brain cells on Mark Lundy's shirt.[21][22]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
