Thanks to my medical background and my international collaborations I was able to make important research contributions to the field of intracellular protein transport and diseases related to misfunctions of it. My laboratory identified the LAMTOR complex and in addition, together with my team and my collaborators, we could identify 5 essential genes in diseases were intracellular transport functions were affected or lysosomal signaling. I have made extensive efforts to translate cell biology into the context of understanding and eventually treating diseases together with clinicians, e.g. the LAMTOR related diseases. Moreover, at the IMP in Vienna we discovered a transcriptional co-regulator named TIS7, which several years later and in a collaboration with Chris Karp’s laboratory turned out to be a novel modifier gene for cystic fibrosis lung disease. Another example is the discovery of MYO5B mutations as cause for a fatal enteropathy of infants, originally described by Ernest Cutz in 1978 and named microvillus inclusion disease. Together with our international network we have recently identified two additional genes: Syntaxin3, causing a variant form of microvillus inclusion disease when mutated and very recently also Munc-18. Several targets identified and validated by us are now in focus of pharmaceutical industry for the development of innovative inhibitors.