A Virus Virtuoso: A Conversation with Molecular Biologist Joe DeRisi
UCSF's Joe DeRisi, PhD, gives science a good name. A relaxed California native, MacArthur Foundation Fellow and imaginative thinker, DeRisi is well-known for being approachable, collaborative, smart and easy to like. So is his science, which concentrates on finding clues to and cures for infectious diseases.
(Media-Newswire.com) - UCSF’s Joe DeRisi, PhD, gives science a good name. A relaxed California native, MacArthur Foundation Fellow and imaginative thinker, DeRisi is well-known for being approachable, collaborative, smart and easy to like.
So is his science, which concentrates on finding clues to and cures for infectious diseases.
DeRisi burst onto the public scene in 2003 when, together with postdoctoral fellow David Wang, PhD, and UCSF virologist Don Ganem, MD, he used microarray technology to detect the SARS virus within 24 hours of receiving it from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The team also classified and genetically defined the virus in quick order.
What became known as the ViroChip, a microarray that contains DNA from every known virus – a number that now approaches 22,000 – was used two years later to identify an unknown virus in human prostate tumors.
That same DeRisi-and-Ganem team has now found a virus associated with an infectious disease that has been killing parrots and other exotic birds for more than 30 years. Better yet, they have developed a diagnostic test so that healthy birds – including some endangered species – can be protected from sick ones, checking the spread of what is known as PDD, proventricular dilatation disease.
Such results might be enough for any other scientist, but DeRisi’s ViroChip work represents only half of his lab’s activity. The rest of his interdisciplinary team is dedicated to discovering weak links in the life cycle of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum. The goal: to identify drug or vaccine targets that could help reduce the annual malaria death toll, which ranges from 800,000 to nearly 3 million. Many of the victims are children under the age of 4.
When DeRisi speaks of this human toll – and the comparative dearth of scientists studying ways to combat malaria – he shakes his head in dismay. But he does not belabor the gesture. There is too much work left to do, too many viruses yet to discover, too much curiosity to sate. And, as he knows and accepts, the public is waiting. He does not plan to keep them waiting long.
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