DRESDEN, Germany, Sept. 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lipotype introduced the Lipidomics Excellence Award (LEA) to give academic groups working on fundamental lipid biology free access to comprehensive lipid analysis. Two recipients, Prof. Dr. Anne-Claude Gavin at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and Prof. Dr. Oliver Schmidt at the Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria, have each published findings based on their award-supported data. Both cases show how a small amount of early support can shape research years later.
Gavin's lab studies how cells move lipids between internal compartments using proteins that each carry very specific cargo. Human cells have more than 130 of these proteins, many linked to disease, yet scientists didn't know exactly which lipids most of them carried. Gavin's team mapped that cargo at scale, and lipidomics data from her LEA award helped confirm the results, closing a gap that had remained unresolved for years. The article “Systematic analyses of lipid mobilization by human lipid transfer proteins” was published in Nature.
Schmidt's lab in Innsbruck studies how yeast cells adjust their membranes when a cellular cleanup process responsible for clearing out unwanted proteins breaks down. His team found that instead of fixing the problem at the protein level, as usually expected, the cells change the thickness of their own membranes to adapt. The award arrived just as Schmidt was establishing his own research group, at a career stage when funding for such exploratory work was hard to come by. The resulting lipidomics data contributed to the article, “The Dsc ubiquitin ligase complex identifies transmembrane degrons to degrade orphaned proteins at the Golgi,” published in Nature Communications, with further publications now in progress.
Lipotype's Lipidomics Excellence Award gives labs free access to lipid analysis without the overhead of a commercial contract and excessive paperwork. In both cases, early-stage support produced data that continues to shape the groups' research today, demonstrating the long-term value of early-stage involvement.
Contact: Olya Vvedenskaya, MD, PhD, Senior communications manager, Lipotype GmbH
Email: vvedenskaya@lipotype.com
Phone: +49 1525 7091457
