- 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Intro
Swedish-born British scientist specializing in cancer research. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with American chemist Paul Modrich and Turkish chemist Aziz Sancar "for mechanistic studies of DNA repair".
Education and Work Experience
1967-1970, Ph.D., Doctor of Medicine at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden
1978-1982, Professor of Medical Chemistry at the University of Gothenburg
1986-2005, Director of the Clare Hall Laboratories, Cancer Research UK
2009-Present, Emeritus Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute
Honors and Awards
1988, Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
1998, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci)
2015, Nobel Prize in Chemistry
2018, Foreign Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Major Academic Achievements
Tomas Lindahl studies the operation of cellular DNA repair mechanisms and their relation to the fields of cancer therapy and inherited genetic disorders. His work has helped to measure rates of DNA decay and identify a number of proteins involved in DNA repair. As certain cancer therapies can induce DNA lesions — physical changes or breaks in the sequence —his findings have applications in the development of anticancer drugs targeted to mitigate this effect.