Joseph ("Mike") McCune is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He received his AB degree from Harvard College in 1975, his PhD degree from Rockefeller University in 1981, and his MD degree from Cornell University Medical College in 1982. He completed his residency in internal medicine in 1984 and did fellowship training in infectious diseases at UCSF. He is board certified in internal medicine.
The McCune lab has been involved for many years in the analysis of HIV pathogenesis, prevention, treatment, and cure. Dr. McCune started to treat patients with HIV disease as a resident in internal medicine at UCSF in 1982 and has been involved in the HIV/AIDS research field ever since. This work included postdoctoral studies at Stanford, exploring the fusogenic properties of the HIV envelope protein and developing the first humanized mouse model (the SCID-hu mouse) capable of multilineage human hematopoiesis and receptive to infection with primary isolates of HIV. He then co-founded the companies SyStemix (in 1988) and Progenesys (and 1991), serving as Scientific Director and leading research efforts to find better ways – including antiviral medications and hematopoietic stem cell-based gene therapy – to treat HIV disease. In 1995, Dr. McCune returned to academia, first as an investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology and then (from 2006-2016) as the Chief of the Division of Experimental Medicine (which he founded) at UCSF. Concomitantly, he was the founding PI (and Senior Associate Dean) of the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute at UCSF (from 2005-08). In recent years, he has helped to form multidisciplinary, collaborative research teams to find a cure for HIV disease. Throughout this time, he has actively mentored graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have gone on to successful careers in academia or biotech/pharma.
Dr. McCune’s studies have led to the publication of over 200 peer-reviewed articles, and he is the holder of 20 patents and inventions. He is a member of many scientific and professional societies, including the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Association of Physicians, and the Henry Kunkel Society. He has served on the editorial boards of Virology and the Journal of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. He was awarded the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation Scientist Award in 1996, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Clinical Scientist Award in Translational Research in 2000, a MERIT Award from the NIH in 2001, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award in 2004, and the Holly Smith Award for Exceptional Service to the School of Medicine in 2016. He was also selected to give the UCSF Academic Senate Faculty Research Lecture (on Translational Science) in 2013.