Francis V. Chisari

Biosketch

Chisari graduated from Fordham University (Biology, magna cum laude) in 1963, and from Weill Cornell Medical College (Doctor of Medicine, Alpha Omega Alpha) in 1968. After an internship in internal medicine at New York Hospital and a fellowship in anatomic pathology at the Mayo Clinic he served as a United States Public Health Service officer at the NIH and completed his training in internal medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in 1973. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation (now Scripps Research) from 1973-1975, and rose through the ranks to full professor in 1988, during which he spent a sabbatical year as a Fogarty Scholar in molecular biology at the Pasteur Institute in 1983-84. He retired from Scripps in 2015 where he currently serves as professor emeritus. During his tenure at Scripps, he served as Director of the NIH-funded General Clinical Research Center from 1984 to 2004 while also heading the Division of Experimental Pathology and the Laboratory of Experimental Virology from 1988 to 2015 funded entirely by NIH grants. He now serves as a consultant for a variety of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.

Research Interests

As a physician-scientist, I am interested in the immunological basis for viral clearance and disease pathogenesis during persistent viral infections, the signaling pathways and effector molecules that mediate these antiviral effects, and the viral evasion strategies that subvert them. Using the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) as models, my laboratory demonstrated that cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) secrete antiviral cytokines that inhibit viral replication without killing the infected cells, thus controlling the infection while preserving the vital functions of the infected tissue, establishing new paradigm in viral pathogenesis and immunobiology. Further, we demonstrated that, in the absence of these noncytolytic antiviral functions, the cytolytic function of the CTL response triggers chronic immune-mediated liver injury and inflammation that result in the development of hepatocellular carcinoma. Collectively, these studies provide a scientific basis for the development of immunotherapeutic approaches for prevention and treatment of chronic viral infection.