Stockholm, Sweden. (Notimex) .- The 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded today to the Swedish Tomas Lindahl, the American Paul Modrich and Turkish-American Aziz Sancar for his cancer research, said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The winners were provided, with his studies on the mechanisms of DNA repair, basic information on the functioning of cells, knowledge that can be used in the development of new cancer treatments, said the Academy.
The Nobel Committee said in its ruling that daily DNA is damaged by UV radiation, free radicals or carcinogens, including snuff, but despite these attacks its molecules remain inherently stable.
To do this, our cells have a particular “toolbox” that allows repair defective genetic material.
These mechanisms, however, were completely unknown in the 1970s, one time when it was believed that DNA was a very stable biological molecule.
At the beginning of the decade, the scientific community believed that DNA was an extremely stable molecule, but Lindahl studies found that not so, what led him to discover a molecular machinery that constantly repair the DNA and prevents spoilage.
Sancar, of Turkish origin but with US nationality, has focused its work on the repair systems nucleotide excision, a mechanism to remedy the damage caused by ultraviolet radiation.
When a person is born with a system that defective type, will develop skin cancer if exposed to sunlight.
Modrich, meanwhile, has shown how cells correct errors that occur when DNA is replicated during cell division; variant of hereditary colon cancer, for example, is due to a congenital defect in the mechanism.
Studies Lindahl, Sancar Modrich and have allowed the development of new cancer drugs, including olaparib, a monoclonal antibody used in the fight against ovarian tumors.
Lindahl, born in 1938 in Stockholm (Sweden), is group chief emeritus Francis Crick Institute for Biomedical Research in London emeritus director of cancer research at Clare Hall Laboratory of Hertfordshire (UK).
Sancar, born in 1946 in Savur (Turkey), a doctorate in 1977 from the University of Texas-based Dallas and is professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA).
Meanwhile, Modrich, born in 1946, received his doctorate in 1973 Stanford University (US) and is currently a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor of biochemistry at the Faculty of Medicine at Duke University in Durham (EU).
The three scientists will receive the 10th December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, a gold medal, a diploma and a check for eight million Swedish kronor (about $ 958,000), an amount that is shared if more than one winner in the same category.
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