Olufunmilayo Falusi Olopade

1957(?)–

Medical researcher, physician

Dr. Olufunmilayo Falusi Olopade received a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2005 in recognition of her groundbreaking research on the genetics of breast cancer among women of African descent. Olopade's research, partly carried out in Chicago and partly in her home country of Nigeria, contributed to the understanding of the aggressive cancers that tend to strike younger woman, and of why these cancers tend to occur more frequently in African and African-American women. Olopade's discoveries have direct implications for cancer treatment and prevention, and she has balanced her career between pure research and its applications in clinical situations as director of the Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics at the University of Chicago.

Born around 1957 in Nigeria, Olufunmilayo (or "Funmi") Falusi Olopade was the fifth of six children. Olopade grew up speaking Yoruba, one of Nigeria's native languages. Her father was an Anglican (Episcopal) minister, and her parents decided that one way they could serve their community was to send one of their children to medical school. Olopade volunteered, and she was helped along the way by a Nigerian government scholarship. She received her medical degree from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria in 1980, along with a host of prizes for her top coursework in pediatrics, surgery, and general excellence.

Olopade became a medical officer at a Nigerian naval hospital after graduating, fulfilling a national-service requirement expected of all young Nigerians who received university degrees. She then set out to further her education, coming to the United States to take an internship and residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in 1983. By 1986 she had risen to the rank of chief resident. With a stellar medical career underway in Chicago, and political instability due to a military coup afoot in her homeland, Olopade decided to remain in the United States. She married another African-born physician, Dr. Christopher "Sola" Olopade, who studied sleep disorders. The couple had some interrupted sleep of their own as they raised two daughters and a son in a home in the Kenwood neighborhood near the University of Chicago campus.

Admitted to the University of Chicago in 1987, Olopade began to add a major research component to her career. As a fellow in oncology and hematology, she undertook lab examinations of the genetic changes involved in leukemia, and she discovered a gene that was involved in the suppression of tumor growth. As her career developed, she used research and the knowledge gained from practical clinical situations to reinforce one another. In 1991 she joined the faculty of the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine as assistant professor, later becoming associate professor, and then a full professor. She co-founded the university's Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics in 1992 and has since continued to direct its operations.

That clinic brought Olopade in contact with a clientele in which African-American women from Chicago's South Side were heavily represented. She noticed a phenomenon that had long been apparent to other oncologists: although African-American women in general suffered from breast cancer less often than white women, they tended to develop the disease at younger ages; the onset of the disease in whites typically occurs after menopause, in a woman's sixth or seventh decade. Why? "The more compelling horror stories I heard from my patients," Olopade told Kelli Whitlock Burton of Medicine on the Midway, "the more compelled I became to figure it out." And the forms of breast cancer that afflicted younger women grew aggressively and were the hardest to treat. All too often, a breast cancer diagnosis was a death sentence for a young woman.

Olopade's observations accorded with what she had already encountered. Even as a medical student in Nigeria she had seen female patients come into clinics with tumors that were often written off as skin irritations. One of Olopade's cousins died in her mid-30s after a cancer was misdiagnosed as a boil. When Olopade returned to her home country for the wedding of her niece in 1997, she set up a meeting with a Nigerian cancer specialist. As she walked through a waiting room filled with female cancer patients in their prime, the pieces of the puzzle began to come together. It was something in the nature of the disease in Africa that let it strike younger women.

So, Olopade reasoned, the early-onset tumors she had seen in her clinic in Chicago might be the result of genetic factors specific to women of African background, not of environmental or lifestyle factors. She worked to devise programs to test her working hypothesis, undertaking genetic analysis of cancers in women from both Chicago and Nigeria. "We're going to assemble [a group] from totally different environments to see what might be the common thread," Olopade told Sarah A. Klein of Crain's Chicago Business. She had few previous studies to rely on, for existing analyses of cancer development, whether because of bias or because of the self-selection of research subjects in predominantly white university communities, tended to involve white patients. And the intersection of ethnicity and cancer susceptibility was poorly understood in general. "People in Africa have been understudied, and even African-Americans in this country have been understudied," Olopade told Charles Storch of the Chicago Tribune.

At a Glance …

Born 1957(?) in Nigeria; married Christopher "Sola" Olopade (a physician and medical researcher); children: three. Education: University of Ibadan, Nigeria, MD, 1980; University of Chicago, postdoctoral fellow studies in hematology and oncology, 1987–1991.

Career: Nigerian naval hospital, medical officer, 1980–81; Cook County Hospital, Chicago, IL, internal medicine intern, 1983–84; Cook County Hospital, internal medicine resident, 1984–86; Cook County Hospital, chief resident, 1986–87; Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago, faculty, 1991–; University of Chicago Hospitals, Center for Clinical Cancer Genetics, director, 1992–; University of Chicago, Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor in medicine and genetics, 2006–.

Selected memberships: American Association for Cancer Research; American Association for the Advancement of Science; American College of Physicians; American Society for Preventative Oncology; American Society of Breast Disease; American Society of Clinical Oncology; American Society of Hematology; Association of American Professors; African Organization for Research and Training in Cancer; American Society for Clinical Investigation; Association of American Physicians; Young Survival Coalition, board member; Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation, board member.

Selected awards: Nigerian Federal Government Merit Award, 1975; Nigerian Medical Association Award for Excellence in Pediatrics, 1978; Nigerian Medical Association Award for Excellence in Medicine, 1980; University of Ibadan College of Medicine departmental prizes in pediatrics, medicine, and surgery, 1980; Association for Brain Tumor Research/Ellen Ruth Lebow Fellowship, 1990; American Society for Clinical Oncology Young Investigator Award, 1991; James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award, 1992; Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award, 2000; Phenomenal Woman Award for work within the African-American community, 2003; Access Community Network's Heroes in Healthcare Award, 2005; MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 2005.

Addresses: Home—Chicago, IL. Office—University of Chicago Hospitals, 5841 S. Maryland Ave., MC 2115, Chicago, IL 60637. Web—www.uchospitals.edu/physicians/olufunmilayo-olopade.html.

Olopade had the results of her initial study in hand by 2000, and they were promising. Both the Chicago patient group and the one in Nigeria showed cancers that resulted from mutations or abnormalities in two genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. Some of Olopade's Chicago patients suffered from cancers that seemed to run in families, and these often showed the BRCA1 gene mutation. Armed with these findings, Olopade and three other researchers applied for and received a $9.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. "Part of our work as scientists is not only to study biology and science, but also to engage society. If we can't translate our research to help people, then why are we doing the work?" Olopade mused to Whitlock Burton.

Olopade's new research got underway in 2003, expanding the African side of the project to Senegal and focusing on more detailed genetic testing of women in Chicago. By April of 2005 the project had begun to yield results. She and her associates were ready with a spate of papers presented to a meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research in California, and they had dramatic implications for cancer treatment. Their most important finding was that in Africa, 80 percent of the tumors studied were "estrogen-receptor negative" or ER-negative—they did not need the female hormone estrogen to grow, and thus they could not be killed by suppressing the supply of estrogen that reached the tumor cells. The comparable figure for tumors in women of Caucasian descent was 20 percent.

This discovery was important because many new drugs designed to treat breast cancer worked exactly this way, and would therefore have no effect on the tumors of African-American patients whose tumors had the ER-negative feature. These patients would have to undergo the older and more difficult forms of treatment with chemotherapy and radiation. Other discoveries by Olopade and her team likewise held implications for the treatment of African or African-American cancer patients with new cancer drugs. Olopade came to believe that breast cancer was not exactly a single disease but a host of related problems that affected different women in different ways.

A second major set of implications of Olopade's research was that African and African-American women needed testing and genetic screening for breast cancer more often and earlier in their lives. But she found that the patients who needed screening weren't getting it. In Nigeria, she knew, people went without health care because doctors were rare in many parts of the country, but she was shocked to find the same situation in the U.S. "Any time you talk about disparity, you have to come back to the American health care system: 44 million people don't have access," she explained to Whitlock Burton. "If you don't have access, how can you do prevention? How can you have early detection? We need to advocate for equity—to at least have a more level playing field." Olopade and University of Chicago researcher Michael Hall wrote an editorial in 2005 in the Journal of the American Medical Association arguing that the effectiveness of scientific advances in their field depended on the resolution of inequities in patient care.

Although Olopade's discoveries were specialized, word of their implications spread beyond the field of cancer research, and in September of 2005 Olopade received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, popularly known as a "genius grant." The fellowship provided, annually, 25 grants of $500,000 each (disbursed over five years) to researchers and creative figures in a variety of fields, with no reporting requirements or limitations placed on how the money was used. Olopade's reaction on getting the foundation's telephone call, she told Charles Storch, was, "Oh, my God. How? Why me?" Olopade's research was already changing the face of cancer treatment, and with a host of new studies underway that were designed to test the relationship between genetics and specific therapies, she had a busy schedule. But there was an overarching philosophy to her work. Asked by Storch what her plans were for the $500,000 in fellowship money, she responded that she and her husband "are just going to continue doing what we were doing, which is advocating for the vulnerable."

Sources

Periodicals

Africa News, April 18, 2006.

Boston Globe, March 23, 2004, p. C1.

Chicago Tribune, September 20, 2005, p. 1.

Crain's Chicago Business, November 27, 2000, p. 15.

Jet, October 10, 2005, p. 36.

On-line

"The Face of Breast Cancer," Medicine on the Midway, www.uchospitals.edu/pdf/uch_009154.pdf (July 25, 2006).

"Nigerian Woman Wins the MacArthur Genius Grant," Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies, www.jendajournal.com/issue7/olopade.html (July 25, 2006).

"Olufunmilayo Olopade," Biography Resource Center, http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (July 26, 2006).