Dr Close is married and has two children. He enjoys spending time with family, especially biking and hiking in nature. He likes to discover unique places and landscapes that were given to us by the nature. He also enjoys music very much and says that it is important for balance in his life – he says "There is always music for every important moment of your life”.

A crucial part of the life of a cell is to generate proteins. To make proteins, biological ‘machinery’ in the cell reads instructions from DNA and a careful step-by-step process translates them into the proteins. One type of molecule important to this process is called ‘transfer RNA’, or tRNA.

Dr Pierre Close and his team have been studying how tRNA might be important to how cancer cells adapt and resist treatment. Specifically, they believe that if a cancer cell is able to control this process, it could reprogramme it to generate the proteins that allow it to resist treatment.

The researchers now aim to understand how this might be happening in melanoma, a type of skin cancer that is particularly ‘good’ at resisting the effects of treatments that should otherwise work. They will use samples from patients with melanoma and test if the cancer cells are able to control the protein-making process. They also want to find out if targeting the tRNA, which is crucial to this process, could be a new way to make melanoma treatments more effective – or even create new ones.