Sancar, Aziz, 1946–, Turkish-American biochemist and molecular biologist, M.D. Istanbul Univ., 1969, Ph.D. Univ. of Texas at Dallas, 1977. From 1977to 1982, Sancar was a researcher at the Yale School of Medicine. In 1982, he joined the faculty at the Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he is now Sarah Graham Kenan Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics. In 2015 Sancar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Paul Modrich and Tomas Lindahl for his study of DNA repair. The three researchers clarified the biochemical mechanisms in three different types of DNA repair, laying the foundation for targeted cancer therapies that leave healthy cells unharmed. Sancar's work focused on nucleotide excision repair, which corrects damage caused by ultraviolet light.
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