By Karen Baar

hen Joseph Testa started college in the fall of 1965, he was entering a strange, new world, one that would transform his life and lead to a career that may, one day, save the lives of millions. But that September day, he was just another very bright, very eager freshman.

“Back then, Southern was called Southern Connecticut State College,” he recalls. “I was the first person in my family to go to college, and I paid $100 a semester for tuition. If you got on the dean’s list, you got your money back. It was the biggest bargain. Can you imagine?”

Today, Dr. Joseph R. Testa, ’69, M.S. ’72, is the director of the Human Genetics Program and the Carol and Kenneth Weg Chair in Human Genetics at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. He returned to Southern in November to receive the Alumni Association’s highest honor, the Distinguished Alumnus Award.

An internationally recognized cancer geneticist, he says that the education and guidance he got at Southern expanded his horizons. “At that time, Southern was one of the only places where all the courses and even the laboratories were taught by professors, not teaching assistants. I was planning to be a teacher, but my biology teachers encouraged me to get my Ph.D.”

Testa is best known for research on malignant mesothelioma. In this form of lung cancer, highly aggressive tumors develop in the lining (mesothelium) of the chest cavity and lungs, and they can spread to the lining of the abdomen and to other organs. “It is one of the most lethal cancers. To this day I know of no one who has been cured,” he explains. The National Cancer Institute estimates that each year some 2,000 Americans will be newly diagnosed with Mesothelioma. Perhaps the most famous victim of the disease was the actor Steve McQueen.

Originally interested in environmental science, Dr. Testa had a change of heart while studying for his doctorate at Fordham University. “During a required course in cytogenetics, I saw photographs of chromosomes magnified a thousand times. I liked art and photography, and the pictures were so beautiful that I became interested from an aesthetic point of view. Then, while doing the assigned readings, I realized you could do interesting work and publish. I was hooked,” he says. Now, some 300 original articles, review papers, and book chapters later, his work has been cited more than 11,000 times in journal articles around the world.

After getting his Ph.D., he honed his skills working with Dr. Janet Rowley at the University of Chicago, who is famous for her studies of chromosome changes in leukemias, a range of diseases characterized by an abnormal increase in the number of white blood cells. Later, after working at the National Cancer Institute and the University of Maryland Medical School, Testa found himself at another turning point in his career.

“Because there had been so many significant discoveries in relation to leukemias and chromosomes, the government announced its support for researchers focusing on similar work with regard to solid tumors, which account for more than 90 percent of cancers,” he says. He and his colleagues won one of only five awards, and turned their attention to mesothelioma.

Since occupational exposure to asbestos is considered the primary risk factor for developing mesothelioma, Testa’s career had come full circle — his focus on environmental science reignited. “I was thrilled because it [the study of mesothelioma] combined my work as a geneticist with environmental science, which I’d been interested in since my days at Southern.”

In 1989, he moved to the Fox Chase Cancer Center. The hardest part of his job is finding the funds to study mesothelioma. “It isn’t a sexy tumor, and there’s no big advocacy group,” he explains. So he has built a remarkable relationship with Local 14 of the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers in Philadelphia. “Each of their several hundred union members offered to donate two cents per hour to our research; eventually, they got the contractors to match the two cents,” he says. “They’ve also had golf tournaments to raise money. Sometimes they raise as much as $150,000 to support our work.”

Testa’s grantsmanship also remains impressive. His group just won the first National Institutes of Health “Program Project Grant” on mesothelioma, which will fund several projects devoted to finding what causes the virulent cancer.

The scientists will be building on an already solid foundation. Earlier studies looked at abnormalities in chromosomes (structures in our cells that carry our genetic material, or DNA), that occur in mesothelioma, and they have found “about a half dozen” that regularly occur. These changes are often deletions of parts of chromosomes; in other words, some of the DNA has been lost. “At these sites, where there’s a chromosomal loss, there are changes in the tumor suppressor genes, which normally act as brakes to keep cells from dividing when they’re not supposed to,” says Testa. “When you lose these suppressors, a tumor can get out of control.”

Testa’s lab was among several around the world that did critical early research on a gene called AKT, which is involved in cell reactions and signaling. Sometimes, there are too many copies of one particular form, known as AKT2; when this happens, it can make a cell cancerous. In addition to mesothelioma, the AKT gene has been implicated in about 20 percent of pancreatic cancers and in some forms of ovarian cancer.

“Our first paper on AKT was published in Science in 1991,” says Testa. “It has been cited 500 times, because this was such important new work. It’s thrilling when you find something that no one has ever found before. It’s an academic emotional high. I don’t think you can match it in many other fields.”

AKT research may soon lead to new cancer therapies. Recently, a major pharmaceutical company approached Testa and other researchers for an “AKT Think Tank” to find chemotherapies that can target and knock out this pathway to cancer. “The fact that something we did in the lab is being thought of as a way to treat cancer is so gratifying,” says Testa.

In the aftermath of 9/11, his work on mesothelioma is poised to become even more significant. “Hundreds of tons of asbestos were released from the destruction of the World Trade Center. Already, most of the dogs who sniffed out survivors are very sick, and many have died. In humans, mesothelioma occurs 20 to 40 years after the initial exposure to asbestos. Dogs live a human life compressed into 10 or 15 years, so we can already anticipate the human disease we may face in the future,” he says.

Testa’s interest in dogs goes way beyond their relevance to science. Along with his 11-year-old daughter and his wife, Priscilla Lyons-Testa, ’70, who graduated from Southern with a degree in education, he lives with nine Jack Russell terriers who compete regionally and nationally in working trials competitions.

So, how did a boy with such modest beginnings become an international success? “I have a classical cytogenetic background and experience in molecular genetics; very few people have that combination,” Testa says. Still, he adds, “Everyone who has had some success must admit that it doesn’t hurt to be in the right place at the right time. I was a Boy Scout, and we always said, ‘Be Prepared.’ That’s true, but the reality is you have to have a little luck.”