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Year of election: | 2004 |
Section: | Chemie |
City: | Pasadena |
Country: | USA |
Dervan's research interests are in bioorganic chemistry with studies directed toward understanding the chemical principles for the sequence specific recognition of DNA by small molecules. Many diseases, such as cancer, are related to aberrant gene expression. Synthetic molecules, programmed to read the DNA double helix, achieve affinities and specificities comparable to DNA-binding proteins. Regulating transcription by chemical methods could be important in human medicine.