Andreas Gt

Biography

Dr. Andreas G. Tzakos obtained his doctoral degree (2004) at the Department of Chemistry, Section of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Ioannina, Greece. During this period he received numerous awards-fellowships (EMBO, FEBS, Marie Curie, NATO, Greek State Scholarship Foundation) and trained in Florence (CERM) and Utrecht (SON NMR) in multidimensional NMR techniques. In 2004 he received the Leonidas Zervas award. After postdoctoral research as an EMBO fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK), he is currently (since 2009) a Lecturer at the University of Ioannina at the Department of Chemistry, Greece. The same year he became a member of the interscience molecular oncology lab (iMOL) of the Cancer Biobank Center of the University of Ioannina, which is a member of the European Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructures. He is also a committee member of the NMR center of the University of Ioannina that belongs to the Network of Horizontal Laboratory Units. He has authored more than 30 research articles in the field of (a) structural biology (NMR), (b) rational design, synthesis and biological evaluation of bioactive peptides, plant derived natural products and small bioactive molecules targeting pharmaceutically important receptors, (c) biocatalysis and (d) network pharmacology. He has also filled a priority UK patent application with MRCT, LMB, Cambridge on novel and selective AT2R analogues. His current interests include decoding the molecular mechanisms, which underlie cancer development using multidisciplinary approaches in the interfaces of chemistry, biology and medicine. To this, we utilize modern NMR methodologies complemented by numerous biophysical (fluorescence, CD, ITC, DSC) and bioinformatic techniques to characterize the dynamic, structural and thermodynamic properties of the studied systems as also their interactions.

Research Interest

Molecular Modeling and computer-aided drug design.  Peptides and Natural Products as Potential Therapeutic Agents & their applications in Nanobiotechnology. Phytochemical analysis and biological evaluation in cancer cell lines. Organocatalysis and Biocatalysis. Network Pharmacology. NMR, MS and calorimetry based techniques.