The aim of this award is to motivate young talents to address phytochemical and phytopharmacological questions, especially with potential clinical implications to advance our understanding of the therapeutic potential of natural products.
It is bestowed annually during the GA conference. This year in Dublin, the Dr. Willmar-Schwabe-Young-Talent-Prize, which is sponsored by Dr. Wilmar Schwabe GmbH & Co with 2000€, was bestowed to Dr. Adriano Rutz for his innovative work on the LOTUS initiative.
Dr. Adriano Rutz is a pharmacist by training.
After working in the analytical research laboratory and R&D department of Tradall SA (Bacardi Group), he obtained his PhD in phytochemistry at the University of Geneva, under the supervision of Professor Jean-Luc Wolfender.
As an advocate of open science and open data, he is the proud author of the LOTUS initiative, a new way of sharing knowledge in the field of natural products research.
This initiative is a cornerstone of phytopharmacological research. Based on the valuable knowledge built over 100 years of phytochemical studies, LOTUS has the potential to facilitate the incorporation of natural products in the era of informatics. The LOTUS initiative promises to strengthen the foundations on which future phytochemical investigations will be conducted and helps building bridges to other fields. It is designed to efficiently inform machine learning strategies in the best circumstances. Its use can range from taxonomically informed metabolite annotation, to finding structural novelty, providing molecular arguments for biodiversity conservation up to guiding drug discovery for various diseases.
Adriano Rutz’s current research as a PostDoc (ETH Zurich) focuses on the development of open informatics tools and mass spectrometry-based strategies to better understand the chemistry of living organisms.
