ETH Professor Paola Picotti receives Otto Naegeli Prize

(CONNECT) Paola Picotti is awarded the Otto Naegeli Prize for Medical Research 2026. It is considered one of the most important scientific prizes in Switzerland, has been awarded every two years since 2000 and is endowed with 200,000 Swiss francs. The award ceremony will take place on May 19 at the ETH.

According to a statement from ETH Zurich, the award recognizes the outstanding achievements of Picotti and her group in the development of mass spectrometry technologies and their application in researching human diseases. "Previous awards have mainly related to technological breakthroughs or our contributions to basic biological research," the ETH professor is quoted as saying. "The Otto Naegeli Prize now recognizes how these discoveries impact biomedicine and ultimately human health. That means a lot to me."

In addition, it is "both a great honor and a responsibility" to stand in line with the previous award winners. Picotti is only the seventh woman among the 43 researchers who have received this award to date.

The Picotti Group was founded at ETH in 2011. With the help of a mass spectrometer and the LiP-MS technology she developed, Picotti finally created a highly sensitive, lightning-fast protein scanner that can analyze thousands of protein structures simultaneously directly from patient samples. In this way, changes in various neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's can be detected and disease mechanisms deciphered.

In addition, the approach has opened up new research directions, for example with regard to the investigation of other diseases such as cancer or the identification of target structures for new active substances. Next, Picotti wants to find out how this structural information can be used to design specific active molecules that correct the changes detected. ce/mm