Hepatitis C researcher Joseph Marcotrigiano has come full circle to where it all began for him. A Rutgers assistant professor of chemistry since 2007, he works at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM), a research unit operated jointly by Rutgers and UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Marcotrigiano was once a CABM summer undergraduate researcher under Rutgers chemistry Professor Eddy Arnold. Marcotrigiano graduated from Rutgers College in 1995 as a Henry Rutgers Scholar, majoring in chemistry. Born in Hoboken of Italian immigrant parents, when he was age 5 his family moved to Nutley, home of Hoffmann-La Roche pharmaceuticals. This is where Aaron Shatkin was then conducting his groundbreaking molecular research. Shatkin later became Marcotrigiano’s undergraduate mentor at Rutgers and is now the director of CABM – a circle within a circle.

FOCUS: How does it feel to be back at Rutgers after a 12-year absence?

Marcotrigiano: It’s nice to be back, and at the same time it’s weird. I was one of these kids. I look at my students and say, “This was me.” I took the class that I now teach. It’s very different now from when I was here. The most striking difference is that there is a lot more school spirit – and I don’t think it’s just because of football. I think students are starting to appreciate Rutgers as being a rather special place with many opportunities.

FOCUS: Were you already interested in chemistry when you entered Rutgers?

Marcotrigiano: At that time I wanted to go to medical school, and I was interested in doing medically relevant research. I really stumbled onto this road. I wouldn’t say I planned it. I heard that Eddy Arnold’s group had just worked out the structure of the HIV reverse transcriptase, the enzyme necessary for the virus’s replication. I knew Eddy wasn’t taking on anybody at the time, but I kept showing up at his door and saying, “I’d really like to work with you. I’d really like to work with you.” And I think Eddy finally just gave up. He said, “Okay, fine. Just show up.” I learned a lot in those two years I worked with Eddy. 

FOCUS: What brought you to your current line of research – the study of the hepatitis C virus (HCV)?

Marcotrigiano: I became interested in protein structure, which is what Eddy Arnold was doing and what I still do. Understanding the virus’s structure and the enzymes it uses to replicate can help us turn these enzymes into specific drug targets. Hepatitis C infects 200 million people worldwide – four to five times as many people as HIV – due in part to its lack of symptoms. You can be asymptomatic for 20 to 30 years, but when things go bad, they go bad very, very quickly. Current treatments are a combination of drugs that boost the immune system to fight infection and are taken for as much as a year with severe side effects. Interferon, for example, is one of the drugs used in HCV treatment. A patient who was taking it told me that it is as if he had the flu for a year. 

FOCUS: What direction is your work on HCV taking?

Marcotrigiano: Through our structural analyses, we are trying to identify specific enzyme targets that we can go after precisely and directly with small molecules without all the side effects. One of the HCV enzymes, one of two HCV proteases, is so unusual and different from anything we have seen that its uniqueness may make it an exceptionally good target. 

FOCUS: Now that you teach undergraduate students, are you passing along that enthusiasm you displayed as an undergraduate? 

Marcotrigiano: I am trying to. More than just teaching the course, I try to communicate my feelings about the science to them, many of whom are premed students as I was. I explain how I was going to be a medical doctor, and then I just got hooked on this. I tell them that as an M.D. you can make that one patient better, but when you do research, you can affect millions of people. Researchers are not physically touching the patients, but they are changing their lives. Developing new treatments for cancer, for HIV, for Parkinson’s disease – that’s done primarily in the lab, and your research can really have a profound effect.