When National Cancer Institute scientist Stephen J. O’Brien, Ph.D., visits Charleston Sept. 18, MUSC’s Takis S. Papas, Ph.D., will be greeting an old friend.

“We grew up in the virus cancer program together,” Papas said. “We met as lab chiefs at the NIH (National Institutes of Health). It was when (President Richard M.) Nixon declared war on cancer.”

Papas, who directs MUSC's Center for Molecular and Structural Biology, recounted the excitement of those times at the NCI (National Cancer Institute) when bright young minds in biomedical research gathered at the Bethesda, Md., laboratories to probe the biochemical, viral and genetic depths of human cell growth gone awry. He pointed to O’Brien in a framed photo with himself and three other former lab chiefs at NIH, including Robert Gallo, M.D., the co-discoverer of HIV, Stu Aaronson, M.D., the director of the cancer center at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, and Jeff Schlom, Ph.D., in a kind of “those-were-the-days” celebration with $75 cigars.

At NCI, they led in the battles against a cancer-causing virus. They learned how a virus enters a cell, captures genes that control cell reproduction and how those genes mutated into oncogenes that propel the cells into a flurry of uncontrolled tumor growth. Today, that war on cancer has shifted to the human genome where Papas, O’Brien and their colleagues in laboratories throughout the world are learning to design gene mutations that repulse the cancer virus and block its damaging effects.

The aim, Papas said, is to target gene therapies in a way that avoids peripheral damage to healthy cells.

O’Brien will be joining Papas and MUSC researchers Bill Turner, M.D., Dan Nixon, M.D., and Nabil Bissada, M.D., as a co-investigator to study collaboratively the high rate of prostate cancer in South Carolina’s African American population. The project is funded by a program grant from the Department of Defense for Coastal Carolina Prostate Cancer research.

“Prostate cancer in African American men is particularly aggressive compared to whites,” Papas said. “Steve O’Brien can bring to our study the technology to identify the genetic parameters of prostate cancer in these men.” He said that O’Brien has “a fantastic record” in the cloning and identification of genes.

Recent science articles in the New York Times and Washington Post describe O’Brien’s work in drawing a genetic connection between a gene mutation that apparently arose as a result of the Black Plague in 14th century Europe and is present among people of Western European descent today to a genetic resistance to AIDS found among those same people. That same gene mutation that protected a large portion of the western European population from succumbing to bubonic plague apparently blocks the HIV virus from infecting its victims with AIDS.

O’Brien has been chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity (formerly Laboratory of Viral Carcinogenesis) at the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health since 1986.

He is internationally recognized for his research contribution in human and animal genetics, evolutionary biology, retrovirology and species conservation. In collaboration with his students, fellows and colleagues, his list of achievements include: gene mapping of more than 100 human genes including scores of cancer oncogenes; developing of the domestic cat gene map as a model for comparative genome analyses; discovery of the remarkable genetic uniformity of the African cheetah, a prelude to genetic assessment of endangered species; solving the century-old evolutionary riddle of the giant panda’s evolutionary history; discovery of epidemic prevalence of feline immunodeficiency (AIDS) virus among wild cat species; and description of the first human gene to affect HIV-1 infection and AIDS progression.

O’Brien was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, to the Explorer’s Club in 1988 and to the Cosmos Club in 1987. He has served as president of the NCI Assembly of Scientists, as chairman of the International Committee on Comparative Gene Mapping for the Human Genome Organization and as an officer of the American Type Culture Collection Governing Board. He is the editor of numerous professional journals, has authored many books and published more than 350 papers.