Joe Delaney, Ph.D.

I am an Associate Professor in the Medical University of South Carolina’s (MUSC) Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and I am a member of the Hollings Cancer Center (HCC). I study the impact of monoallelic alterations to cell biology. My lab’s focus is the investigation of cellular biology causally driven by copy-number alterations (CNA) in cancer cells. Ovarian cancer is a uniquely applicable and challenging model for systems biology and genetics due to the prevalence of 1,000+ gene-level CNAs (16,000 on average per tumor). While ovarian cancer has amongst the most CNAs of any cancer, these alterations are present in all solid tumors, with the median solid tumor having 39% of its genome altered by CNAs. These alterations are present in tumors without any other means of targeted therapy: no mutations in oncogenes or targetable tumor suppressor losses. My research discovered allelic losses of autophagy to be important for ovarian cancer oncogenesis via impairment of chromosome homeostasis and developed drug strategies to target this system, which outperformed chemotherapy. Metallothionein proteins, small chelators of heavy metals and zinc ions, are a major new focus of my lab. Overall, we investigate how copy-number alterations alter the biology of mammalian cells and how those changes lead to oncogenic phenotypes and treatment vulnerabilities.