A researcher at the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Dentistry in Omaha has received a four-year, $720,000 grant from the American Cancer Society.

Greg Oakley hopes to find ways to make chemotherapy more effective. He's researching DNA damage and how cells repair themselves.

He's looking specifically at the process by which cells, good or bad, are damaged by chemotherapy. Oakley hopes to do this by targeting a protein called Replication Protein A. The protein is believed to help repair healthy cells that have been damaged.

Oakley joined the College of Dentistry in 2006 from the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, where he first began studying Replication Protein A in 1996.