For immediate use
UNC-Chapel Hill’s Aziz Sancar headed to Sweden this week to accept Nobel Prize
(Chapel Hill, N.C. – Dec. 3, 2015) – Aziz Sancar, MD, PhD and Sarah Kenan Graham Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, is headed to Stockholm, Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and give a lecture on his groundbreaking work on DNA repair.
Sancar, who has been a professor at the UNC School of Medicine since 1982, left for Sweden today and will return Dec. 14. He will receive his Nobel Medal during the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony Thursday, Dec. 10 at 10:30 am Eastern Standard Time
While in Stockholm, Sancar will also participate in a press conference on Monday Dec. 7 and will deliver his lecture on Tuesday Dec. 8.
At the heart of the lecture will be his story of working in the lab of Stan Rupert, PhD, who discovered how DNA is repaired after UV-induced damage occurs in E. coli bacterial cells. In Rupert’s lab as a graduate student, Sancar cloned the gene that codes for the enzyme photolyase. No one else in Rupert’s lab had been able to accomplish this task. Soon after, Sancar was the first to purify and describe the enzyme, which he published and ultimately earned him his doctorate degree.
Later, at Carolina, Sancar uncovered one of the few major repair mechanisms our bodies use to keep cancer at bay as we are bombarded with environmental factors, such as sunlight and pollution, which constantly damage DNA in our cells. Without these repair systems, the DNA would mutate and lead to cancer. It was Sancar who also found out that disrupting one of these repair systems – which he dubbed nucleotide excision repair – is how the common cancer drug cisplatin kills cancer cells. This work has led to new ideas and methods to attack cancer cells.
Read more about Dr. Sancar’s background and research.
Updates from Sweden will be available at the UNC twitter feed, as well as the official twitter account of Aziz Sancar and his wife, fellow UNC-Chapel Hill scientist Gwen Sancar, PhD.
-Carolina-
About the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the nation’s first public university, is a global higher education leader known for innovative teaching, research and public service. A member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, Carolina regularly ranks as the best value for academic quality in U.S. public higher education. Now in its third century, the University offers 78 bachelor’s, 112 master’s, 68 doctorate and seven professional degree programs through 14 schools and the College of Arts and Sciences. Every day, faculty – including two Nobel laureates – staff and students shape their teaching, research and public service to meet North Carolina’s most pressing needs in every region and all 100 counties. Carolina’s more than 308,000 alumni live in all 50 states and 150 countries. More than 167,000 live in North Carolina.
UNC School of Medicine contact: Mark Derewicz, (919) 923-0959, mark.derewicz@unch.unc.edu
Communications and Public Affairs contact: MC VanGraafeiland, (919) 962-7090, mc.vangraafeiland@unc.edu