Lindahl, Tomas, 1938–, Swedish-born British biochemist, grad. Karolinska Institute (Ph.D. 1967, M.D. 1970). Lindahl was a professor at the Univ. of Gothenburg from 1978 to 1982. In 1981 he joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (Cancer Research UK from 2002), and became the first director (1986–2005) of its Clare Hall Laboratories, Hertfordshire, England. He retired in 2009 but remains affiliated with the Francis Crick Institute, of which Cancer Research UK is now part. Lindahl was the joint recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar, for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. The three clarified the biochemical mechanisms involved in three types of DNA repair, which laid the foundation for targeted cancer therapies that leave healthy cells unharmed. Lindahl's work elucidated base excision repair, identifying enzymes involved and deducing the steps by which damage to the DNA bases (see nucleic acid) is corrected.
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