DeRisi Wins Heinz Award for Virus Detection and Malaria Research

Joseph DeRisi, PhD, Howard Hughes medical investigator and professor of biochemistry at UCSF, today is one of five distinguished Americans selected to receive a $250,000 award presented by the Heinz Family Foundation. “As a scientist, Dr. DeRisi has made breakthrough discoveries that have provided clarity and insight into the detection of some of the world’s most threatening viruses, and his work in finding a cure for malaria offers hope to the hundreds of millions of people afflicted annually by the disease,” said Teresa Heinz, chair of the Heinz Family Foundation. As a young graduate student, DeRisi helped invent microarray technology. Microarrays are bits of DNA printed on a wafer-thin glass slide. Microarrays are now all-but-indispensable tools for researchers who probe genes in life forms ranging from viruses to humans, searching for clues to health and disease. Although the invention spawned new biotech companies and is used by researchers throughout the industry, it did not make DeRisi rich. DeRisi’s altruistic streak was apparent early in his career and that sticks with the wiry 38-year-old today. “We publish all our chip technology, and what goes into it and how to make it, on the web,” DeRisi says. “Anybody that reads our papers or comes to our websites can have the entire know-how to reproduce that technology in their own labs.” Fighting Malaria and Finding Unknown Disease Agents DeRisi is scientific intensity to the nth degree. But all his research publications and recognition are not the main goal. The papers are a byproduct of his real intent — to have an impact on deadly disease, especially malaria. The tropical parasitic disease — out of sight, out of mind in the United States — nonetheless kills in the range of 1 million people globally each year. “I don’t believe there are enough researchers studying malaria,” DeRisi says. “It’s a giant burden on much of humanity.” DeRisi and his team developed a malaria-specific DNA chip, which enabled the researchers to characterize the parasite’s distinctive, 48-hour life cycle, a breakthrough that could pave the way for potential drug and vaccine therapy. Apart from malaria, about half of DeRisi’s research is a search for unidentified infectious viruses that cause disease. The foundation for this search is a specially developed microarray called the ViroChip. DeRisi’s lab and the lab of UCSF virologist Don Ganem, MD, have teamed up to develop and regularly update the ViroChip, which contains the most informative DNA from every known virus. The ViroChip has proven to be a valuable experimental diagnostic tool in cases where serious infections stump experts. Clever and computationally powerful computer programs enable the researchers to use the DNA on the ViroChip to track down previously unknown viruses in patient samples as well. For instance, DeRisi detected the previously unidentified SARS virus within 24 hours of receiving a sample from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. DeRisi is big on looking for viral causes of disease, sometimes even in cases where few others suspect any. For example, he and Ganem recently led a study in which they found an association between prostate cancer and a new virus, although the link between virus and disease remains unclear. Finding new viruses in cancer is pretty surprising, but perhaps less so, DeRisi says, when one considers that nearly 15 percent of cancers worldwide are already attributed to infectious agents, such as human papillomavirus and certain human herpesviruses. “Who’s to say there’s not a larger slice of that pie that has as its source some infectious cause?” DeRisi says. “And that’s just cancers. There are many other diseases for which there are likely to be infectious agents. We just have not figured them out yet.”