Please can you introduce yourself and the research that you carry out at the University of Lübeck.
I'm a Professor of nutritional medicine at the University of Lübeck. My team is interested in finding out what macronutrients and micronutrients are doing to our body, and we hope we can use the results to treat patients and improve personalized medicine.
University at Luebeck NMR Centre - Funding Award Ceremony
University at Luebeck NMR Centre - Funding Award Ceremony from AZoNetwork on Vimeo.
Why are NMR and mass spectrometry crucial tools in nutritional medicine research?
In nutritional medicine, one problem we tend to have is that the studies are not as good as they could be, because we do not have objectives. NMR specifically is a very useful tool for our research, as we can look at how metabolites change with dietary interventions. Using the data, we can make the impact of nutritional medicine much more visible, and we can then try to target the diseases and conditions we want to treat.
What does the funding of the new NMR center at the University of Lübeck mean for you and your research?
The funding ceremony we held today has been a fantastic day. We are very happy to have our stakeholders as a university here together at the campus at Lübeck and to discuss things in an interdisciplinary way.
We are discussing how to translate results from science into the economic area, and vice versa and this is the enthusiasm that we really wanted to share today. We wanted to have a dialogue with all the different people involved, and that has made the day very special for us.
What influence do you expect the new NMR center to have with regards to creating new job opportunities in your region?
It's a very important issue. I strongly believe that scientific progress is the key to economic development, and for companies specifically. We will certainly see some start-ups and spin-offs from the university, but also there will be an impact from our students, who are then going on to be employed in the region. This is a very important issue, and I expect we will be successful in this area in the coming years.
How important is it for you to have standardized approaches which allow you to integrate operations with other groups locally and worldwide?
It's very important to me. I think in former days, a lack of standardization has been a big problem that can be seen when looking at many previous studies in nutritional medicine. I think with more standardization across analytical techniques, we are able to compare our results internationally, and we really wanted to go in this direction because comparing results will accelerate our research enormously.
How will these new instruments help to further drive your own work and research strategies in the near future?
Our focus is going to be on personalized nutrition for sure. From my perspective, this is the topic of the future. We want to tailor nutrition to the specific requirements of an individual person in a certain situation or with a certain lifestyle.
This makes a lot of sense in the nutritional medicine field because we do not want to just support therapies, we also want to treat patients efficaciously with nutritional medicine. The technology behind the research is really our major advantage, which will use to continuously improve our day-to-day work.
About Christian Sina
Christian Sina is a Professor of Nutritional Medicine at the University of Lübeck. He is also the co-founder of Perfood GmbH, a startup dedicated to developing data-based concepts for personalized nutrition and health.
Dr. Sina and his team are dedicated to increasing our current knowledge about personalized nutrition and its impact on health and diseases. He published in high ranked journals such as Nature, Nature Medicine and Gastroenterology and serves as a reviewer for several world-renowned journals and research institutions.