The Department of Therapeutic Radiology congratulates Aziz Sancar, Ph.D., FW ’82, for being awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Paul Modrich, Ph.D., and Tomas Lindahl, Ph.D. The three received the award their groundbreaking “mechanistic studies on DNA repair.”
While at Yale from 1977-1982 in the laboratory of W. Dean Rupp Jr., Ph.D. ’64, professor of therapeutic radiology, Aziz performed some of the initial elegant work elucidating the mechanism of nucleotide excision repair in E. coli, after which he went on to dissect the pathway in human cells at the University of North Carolina. Working at Yale in collaboration with Rupp, Sancar developed approaches to identify DNA repair genes and produce their gene products, enabling their subsequent biochemical studies on nucleotide excision repair. This lead to the discovery by Sancar that the DNA repair proteins themselves removed lesions from the DNA. “Aziz was extraordinarily devoted to his work,” Rupp said.
"We are very proud of Aziz and we congratulate him on his tremendous achievement," said Peter M. Glazer, M.D. ’87, Ph.D. ’87, the Robert E. Hunter Professor and chair of Therapeutic Radiology.