The health industry is growing year on year, and vitamin supplement research and production is a burgeoning business. NattoPharma’s business is in the documentation, manufacturing, and development of vitamin K2. Hogne Vik is the CEO of NattoPharma, and says that he knew he was going to work within the medical field since he was a child. He comes from a family of doctors; his father was a general practitioner. Because of this, Hogne always had a desire to help people and fix what was ailing them. “I am the oldest son in a general practitioner family in Norway,” Hogne explains. ”I grew up with my father constantly busy with patients in his office in the morning, and in the afternoon he was out visiting patients by driving to their homes.”
“In my family, we were four children, and it ended up that two became physicians, one a nurse and one a professional musician. In addition to taking care of our family, my mother was constantly busy answering questions from patients and scheduling my father’s afternoon visits. To be a part of the local physician family had a big influence on me growing up, teaching me that we all should take care of people and try to help them in a healthcare setting.”
”I was dedicated to be a physician since I was five, and I would take phone calls at home when my mother was not there, trying to pick up information from and help the patients. It was therefore a natural choice for me to start my medical university education as soon as I had finished the Norwegian gymnasium [school]. I was a clever pupil, and was allowed to start my medical education early. My idea was to become a normal physician helping people, but it didn’t end up quite like that. During my medical education I got interested in and was very curious about the mechanisms behind diseases, and how we can improve the diagnostic world and have more understanding about how diseases developed.”
It was this curiosity about disease and cures that led Hogne to work in his current industry. He started at a university hospital doing research on immunology and allergic diseases, and from there ended up working in the pharmaceutical industry. ”After I finished medical school, I worked at the university hospital in Bergen, Norway, for around 10 years within research on immunology and allergology and as a specialist in clinical chemistry. Everything we did was focused to try to identify early signs of diseases and how we then could help people the best way, to treat or inhibit further development as soon as possible after we had diagnosed the disease.”