What do you hope to achieve at the NKI?
“I will be investigating how cells’ quality control system works and how we can hijack it in order to cause cancer cell death. To break the cycle of cells proliferating.”
Quality control in a cell… how does that work?
“A human cell is a complex system that continuously checks for bad apples amongst its team. It identifies abnormal proteins, for example, and degrades them if they are too unstable. Proteins are the cell’s workhorses so it needs this control to stay healthy.”
You focus on known suspects through a new lens, right?
“Yes. I work on kinases, an important protein family controlling cell division and survival, amongst other things. Dozens of existing cancer therapies inhibit such kinases. Science is still far from understanding how kinases work, though. It’s so incredibly complex! Working as a postdoc at CEMM in Austria, we discovered that many of the established kinase inhibiting drugs have effects we were not yet aware of.”
Your research group at the NKI will look beyond inhibition. Why is this important?
“Proteins have many functions and inhibitors don’t block all of those. That’s why we will also explore what happens if you completely remove certain proteins from a cell, by degrading them. Cells can already check and degrade their proteins, and we want to use that ability.”
