Sven Heiles has been leading the Lipidomics junior research group at ISAS since 2022. His focus is on the mass spectrometry analysis of lipids. Heiles’ research group is a collaboration with the University of Duisburg-Essen, where Heiles has been jointly appointed as junior professor in Analytical Chemistry.
After completing his PhD at the Technical University of Darmstadt in 2012 and various research visits that included time at the University of California, Berkeley, Heiles worked at the Justus Liebig University Giessen. He initially worked as a post-doc researcher there, progressing to the position of junior head of research group.
The trained chemist is especially interested in the refinement and standardisation of imaging mass spectrometry procedures in order to establish their use in a clinical environment. To this end, together with his junior research group for issues relating to health research and biomedicine, he is primarily further developing procedures based on matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation (MALDI). With this approach, Heiles and his team are establishing new methods to facilitate the structural characterisation of lipids. Their aim: to better establish links between changes to the lipidome and other OMICS data sets, such as proteomics or transcriptomics. For this purpose, they are developing and testing tandem mass spectrometry procedures in combination with chemical derivatisation. The main fields of application for these bioanalytical methods relate to research into the impacted lipid metabolism in the case of cardiovascular disorders and tumours in close collaboration with cooperation partners from university medical centres.