Proteins make our skin and hair, clean our bodies of harmful chemicals, break down our food, tone our muscles or carry oxygen from our lungs to all the cells in our body. By switching off certain proteins, we can also prevent cancer cells from multiplying. Tassos Perrakis studies the structure of proteins to understand how they interact and how that impacts cancer.

Tassos Perrakis is a research scientist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI), working on understanding protein structure and how it affects function. He tries to understand how the chemistry of a cell is changed to lead to disease.