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Brian Henderson first joined USC’s medical school in 1970 and has been a driving force behind many of the school’s most ambitious and successful projects for the past three decades. In conjunction with his landmark and innovative research in such areas as breast cancer epidemiology and genetic susceptibility to cancer, his demonstrated visionary leadership and commitment to quality enabled him to forge a highly productive multidisciplinary basic science research program at the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.

He is the founding chair of USC’s Department of Preventive Medicine, which today is recognized as one of the top preventive medicine departments in the world. As Director of the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, a position he took in 1983, his influence was among those that turned USC/Norris into one of the leading institutions of its kind. He also is the founding director of the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute, which opened in 2002, and where he led recruitment efforts that have thus far netted more than a dozen top-notch scientists. He was awarded the Presidential Medallion, USC’s highest honor, in 1999.

Considered one of the world’s pre-eminent authorities in cancer epidemiology, Brian established the Los Angeles Cancer Surveillance Program in 1972, and the Hawaii-Los Angeles Multiethnic Cohort in 1993. He served as president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies from 1993 to 1995.

Brian’s early research focus was on virology, a pursuit that took him to Africa to study yellow fever with the Arbovirology Unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). His specific areas of current research focus on the interconnection and interplay between environmental and genetic factors in the development, treatment, and prevention of a wide variety of cancers. His work on the influences of reproductive hormones on cancer, as well as that of various dietary components, is both ongoing and widely cited.

A major research interest has been in the pathogenesis of the hormone-related cancers, namely breast, endometrium, ovary and prostate. These cancers share a unique mechanism of carcinogenesis, where endogenous, and sometimes exogenous, hormones drive cell proliferation, and thus the opportunity for the accumulation of random genetic errors. Brian’s research team first suggested that functionally relevant sequence variants in genes involved in steroid hormone metabolism and transport may act together, and with well-known hormonally related risk factors, to define a high risk profile for such cancers.

He and a close colleague, Dr. Laurence Kolonel of the University of Hawaii, established the prospective Multiethnic Cohort (MEC) in the early 1990's with the goal being to identify the genetic and environment risk factors that contribute to difference in cancer risk among African-American, Japanese, Latino, Native Hawaiians and Caucasian men and women. As part of this effort, they have established an impressive biorepository of blood samples from over 80,000 cohort members that serves as the basis for large-scale cancer biomarker studies.

Five years ago he established a collaboration with Eric Lander and David Altshuler at the Broad Institute (formerly the Whitehead Institute at MIT) to initiate comprehensive pathway-based studies of endocrine-related genes in relation with breast and prostate cancer risk; this work that has served as the framework for the NCI Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium (BPC3).

The goal of Brian’s proposed research is to conduct a genome-wide search to find common variants that contribute to breast cancer risk, and which may explain racial ethnic differences in risk, including the high rates in Native Hawaiians, the increasing rates in Japanese-Americans as well as the higher mortality rate in African-Americans and their excess of ER- disease. He and his colleagues are now well-positioned to conduct a multiethnic genome-wide scan to search for susceptibility alleles for breast cancer. The vast environmental and lifestyle exposure data collected in the MEC should allow for an exhaustive search for the genes that act in combination with the environment to influence breast cancer risk within and across racial and ethnic populations. The proposed collection of tumor specimens in this population-based resource also will enable the integration of environmental, germline, and somatic data to facilitate discovery of risk alleles in known and novel pathways involved in breast tumorigenesis and enhance accurate breast cancer risk prediction according to tumor phenotypes.

Brian was inducted into the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1992,. A member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Henderson developed several key research projects, which brought together esteemed epidemiologists, cancer biologist, statisticians and population geneticists, and focused on unraveling the environmental and genetic determinants of cancer as well as racial and ethnic disparities in cancer risk.

A native of California, Brian received his undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and his MD from the University of Chicago in 1962. He completed his internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.