Azerbaijani president awards Turkish biologist Aziz Sancar

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has awarded Aziz Sancar, a Turkish molecular biologist, the Shohrat Order (Order of Glory) by presidential decree for his special merits in strengthening Azerbaijan’s international scientific and humanitarian cooperation.

Sancar specialises in DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints and the circadian clock, Caliber.Az reports, citing the president’s official website.

In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair.

He has made contributions to photolyase and nucleotide excision repair in bacteria that have changed his field.

Turkish chemist recently discovered that a special molecule can be used to help treat brain cancer.

He told Anadolu Agency that the EdU molecule has been one of the most used chemicals in molecular biology since 2008.

The study found that EdU's ability to cross the blood-brain barrier makes it a "potential candidate for treating cancers of the brain."

By Bakhtiyar Abbasov