(Vienna, 12 February 2021) Dimitrios Tsiantoulas from the Department of Laboratory Medicine of the Medical University of Vienna and his colleague Pascal Schneider from the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Lausanne have been awarded a generous joint research grant by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Swiss National Fund (SNF) to investigate how the immune system affects triglyceride metabolism.
Triglyceride (TG) metabolism is integral to life, since it provides and stores the energy the body requires to maintain homeostasis. Any divergence from a balanced triglyceride metabolism, such as occurs, for example, in hypertriglyceridemia, can lead to metabolic syndrome and even to life-threatening conditions such as atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.
It is currently unclear whether components of the immune system are able to regulate TG metabolism and, if so, how. Dimitrios Tsiantoulas and Pascal Schneider want to investigate the role of lymphocyte-associated cytokines in TG metabolism. These studies will provide new insights into the interaction between immune system and lipid metabolism and could give rise to new strategies for treating hypertriglyceridemia (FWF Project No. I 4963 International Projects).
About Dimitrios Tsiantoulas
Dimitrios Tsiantoulas is Principal Investigator at the Department of Laboratory Medicine of the Medical University of Vienna. He completed his PhD in Christoph Binder's group at the Medical University of Vienna and at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. After graduating, he worked as a post-doc, financed by the British Heart Foundation, in the group led by Ziad Mallat at the University of Cambridge.