Marja Jäättelä is head of the Cell Death and Metabolism Unit and the Center for Autophagy, Recycling and Disease at the Danish Cancer Society Research Center in Copenhagen and holds a professorship at the Copenhagen University. She is an elected member of EMBO and the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences and serves in numerous international scientific advisory boards, editorial boards and evaluation panels. Early in her career, Marja Jäättelä identified heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70) as a general survival protein with oncogenic properties and set her mind to define the molecular mechanism by which Hsp70 promotes cancer cell survival. This task required the “reinvention” of the lysosomal cell death pathway, which subsequently became the major focus of her studies. Following long-term ambitious development of novel techniques to study lysosomes with several interdisciplinary approaches, her group identified lysosomal sphingolipid metabolism as an Hsp70 target and a key regulator of lysosomal stability. As a “by-product”, her group identified Hsp70 as a putative remedy for lysosomal storage disorders, and together with Thomas Kirkegaard, she founded Orphazyme (www.orphazyme.com/), a successful biotechnology company that conducts promising pre-clinical development of Hsp70 and Hsp70-inducing drugs for the treatment of these devastating diseases. Her current research focuses on lysosome-and autophagy-targeting drugs suitable for cancer therapy. For this purpose, she has together with her collaborators developed numerous innovative technologies and conducted screening programs to reveal comprehensive functional, proteomic, lipidomic and epidemiological data sets regarding the regulation, function and composition of lysosomes and autophagosomes as well as the effect of clinically relevant lysosome-targeting cationic amphiphilic drugs on the cancer mortality.