Lipid Leaders: Kim Ekroos

Posted on October 03, 2022


Kim Ekroos 360 180 px

Tell us a little bit about yourself

Currently I’m working as the CEO of Lipidomics Consulting Ltd and as the President of the International Lipidomics Society. I’m married and have two fantastic boys. We also have a dog that keeps my fat levels in balance.

I received my Ph.D. degree in biology from the Technical University in Dresden, Germany, in 2003. My thesis work - Characterization of Molecular Glycerophospholipids by Quadrupole Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry – sparked my career path in lipidomics. After exploring the use of lipidomics in pharmaceutical research and in CRO settings and being part of delivering the first ever lipidomics-based biomarkers to the clinic, I founded Lipidomics Consulting to help and advance customers in their lipidomics and lipid research work. The now six years of consulting has been foremost awarding and stimulating, seeing how my +20 years’ experience in the academic, industry and regulatory disciplines of lipidomics have helped the customers to meet their needs and goals. It has been an amazing time, and fantastic to follow how the lipidomics community, that we started, is growing and expanding.

What do you consider the greatest breakthrough in lipid research in recent years?

The multidimensional developments in lipidomics pushing boundaries in 1) analyzing lipids in greatest detail, 2) the precise quantification using state-of-the art standards, 3) localization utilizing imaging techniques, 4) determining the metabolic dynamics using tracers, and finally 5) standardization and harmonization of the whole field.

Did you always envision yourself becoming a scientist? If not, what did you want to be when you grew up? Who influenced you to become a scientist?

No, I was planning to become an engineer. I already had been accepted to an engineering school, when suddenly the direction changed. It was my grandmother that sparked my interest in science, and for this I’m very glad. At the time, she was unfortunately diagnosed with a severe cancer. So, our discussions on “how to beat cancer” completely turned my educational path around and science was the way to go.

What drove you to focus your attention on the lipidome?

Already during my time at the university, I studied lipids and lipid membranes. But it was not before my PhD studies in the lab of Kai Simons, my true passion in lipids evoked. Lipid rafts or lipid microdomains had recently been described, but it was unclear what they consisted of. What are the lipid species, how complex is the content, how much do we have, were questions that we at that time had no answer to. There were means, i.e. proteomics, to identify the proteins but for the lipids we had no such technique. This initiated the collaboration with Andrej Shevchenko to start developing an “omic” technology for lipids, learning from the field of proteomics. Evidently, the method developed during my thesis became one of the first existing lipidomics methodologies, which now allowed us to quantify hundreds of lipid species from minute amounts of sample and start identifying the lipid makeups in lipid microdomains and beyond. It was a breakthrough and the era of lipidomics had begun.

What are the future implications of understanding the metabolome, lipidome, and genome and how they are integrated?

Standardization and harmonization of lipidomics together with integration of biochemistry, analytical chemistry, biophysics, biology, bioinformatics, medicine, among many others, paves the way to the collective wisdom that will take us beyond our current knowhow in lipid biology. Additional knowhow from neighboring omics data is pivotal, as it creates a more complete map of the biological metabolism, e.g., genes regulating lipids and how this communicates with the surrounding metabolism. This is the path forward to identify the unknowns’ underlying diseases and improve human health. However, we are not able to achieve the highest biological value or metabolic map before we reach standardization and harmonization census in other omics fields.

Tell us a little bit about the International Lipidomics Society (ILS) and how it got started?

Over the years we have recognized an increasing number of issues in published metabolomics and lipidomics reports. It is already seven years since we made our first comment on this topic. In parallel, others made similar observations. In 2018, together with Gerhard Liebisch, we decided to establish the Lipidomics Standards Initiative (LSI), as a platform working towards standardization and harmonization of lipidomics. This received high attention and interest from many users and colleagues. A discussion with key leaders in lipidomics was initiated to create something bigger; a community-based flagship that serves as the central homebase for the whole field and is open to everyone. Among others, the flagship should be the point of contact for lipidomics research, development, networking and commercialization, foster global collaboration and transparent communication, and organize annual international meetings, workshops and training courses. The International Lipidomics Society (ILS) was founded in June 2019 to serve these purposes, having the homebase in Helsinki. Today, we have about 120 members, both academic and industry. We have just released the Minimal Reporting Checklist for Lipidomics (Comment in Nature Metabolism) and have initiated several active Interest Groups driving the next-generation developments for the field.

What are your hobbies? What do you like to do outside of the lab?

Normally I do sports activities or take a long walk with our dog, to shake of the work stress and keep the fat-load in shape.

What do you think are the biggest challenges in the field of lipidomics today? What do you think the community can do to address this?

One of the major challenges is data interpretation. How do we translate the lipid data and findings into biological meaning? Can we add a biological meaning to every lipid? These are extremely challenging questions which we now need to tackle, or otherwise we might start to recognize a decline in interest in the field due to, e.g., unmet expectations. Standardization together with integration and crosstalk with other disciplines are central efforts to address the data translation challenge. We have already started an ILS Interest Group with the theme Lipid Function, aiming to define the biological functions of lipids by bringing experts from multiple disciplines together. It is this collective wisdom that will take us beyond our current knowhow in lipid biology.