Constable: AIDS lessons help scientist tackle Zika

Now a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, O'Connor, 39, was continuing a decadelong HIV research project in Brazil last October when researchers there asked for his help with a new birth-defect problem. Several children in northern Brazil had been born with microcephaly, characterized by small heads and undeveloped brains. On Feb. 15 of this year, using the technologies developed during his HIV studies, O'Connor and his team back in Wisconsin began the first experiments in the world studying the Zika virus in monkeys.

"A year ago, if you had told me I'd be here talking about Zika virus, I wouldn't have believed you at all," O'Connor said during his testimony June 29 before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's roundtable about Zika. "Until recently, we simply didn't view Zika virus as a major threat to human health #x2026; Because it's been an understudied virus, we simply don't know very much about it."

That is changing minute by minute because of a decision by O'Connor and his Zika Experimental-Science Team researchers to share their results online in real time. Other researchers around the world are doing the same.

"We make sure the science is solid and then we put it online," O'Connor says. "In the last several infectious disease outbreaks, one of the things we're seeing is that time is of the essence."

During last year's Ebola outbreak, O'Connor and his lab picked up raw data posted online by a team led by Pardis Sabeti, a computational geneticist at the Broad Institute and Harvard University, and the two teams collaborated on important research. "That wouldn't have happened had they not made their data available," says O'Connor, who tweeted out a thanks to @PardisSabeti this February: "Your leadership by example inspired us to share data and results from our nhp (nonhuman primate) Zika studies in real-time."

While some research facilities might have a proprietary interest in safeguarding the results of experiments, O'Connor says the University of Wisconsin-Madison and other researchers around the world understand the importance of avoiding duplication and streamlining the process for Zika treatment and a vaccine.

"To me, it's a no-brainer. The results are really the property of the taxpayers," O'Connor says, noting that much of the funding comes from the National Institutes of Health.

A 1994 graduate of Buffalo Grove High School, O'Connor credits biology teacher Sharon Jackson and physics teacher Saul Ploplys for fueling his passion in science.

"I still have a vivid picture of him, sitting near the back of my AP biology class, always an avid participant in whatever the topic may have been, from plants to evolution to genetic engineering," Jackson recalls. "I always knew he would go far in this world. He was determined to make a difference, and what a difference he is making with the Zika virus. He is one of the best BGHS has ever graduated."

During his senior year in high school, O'Connor read Laurie Garrett's "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance," which looked at a half-century of diseases and viruses spreading across the globe.

"It glamorized researchers studying infectious diseases. If HIV came out of nowhere in the 1980s, what infectious disease is going to come out of nowhere in the future?" O'Connor remembers thinking. His newfound passion helped him win an essay contest, which allowed him to work in a college research lab as an undergrad. He earned so much advance-placement credit in high school, O'Connor graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign a year early.

"I didn't realize I could graduate in three years until I started to hear from Jostens, the school ring people," says O'Connor, who went on to get his doctoral degree in medical microbiology and immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His mom, Linda, retired as an English teacher at Wheeling High School. His dad, Mark, is a retired efficiency expert. His younger brother, Jay, works as a computer programmer in California.

"My mother, who is 95, was watching him on C-SPAN," Linda O'Connor says of one of David O'Connor's moments in the spotlight as one of the world's top Zika researchers.

"It's been a little unusual for a scientist," O'Connor says of the international attention. "The work I've done on Zika in a couple of months gets more attention than all the work I did on HIV."

While none of the pregnant monkeys in his lab have had fetuses with small heads, his research squad has released results showing Zika virus stays much longer in the blood of pregnant monkeys, possibly because the fetus sheds the virus back into the mother's blood. O'Connor is at the forefront of Zika research, in part because of his work since 1997 with AIDS and HIV.

"We have the same questions with Zika," says O'Connor, who is in Durban, South Africa, for the 2016 International AIDS Conference, which starts Monday. Just as scientists did with HIV, they are learning how Zika spreads and makes people sick, developing a vaccine and even keeping people from unreasonable fears and stigmatizing people with the virus.

"For people who aren't pregnant, there's no reason to worry about Zika," says O'Connor, who has been to Brazil more than a dozen times with his wife, Shelby, also a Wisconsin professor, and their 7-year-old son, Eli. "To the best of our knowledge, there is no risk to people who get Zika virus and then get pregnant after that."

He says Zika fears shouldn't keep people from the Olympics, Aug. 5-21 in Rio de Janeiro.

"Rio is an amazing city full of wonderful people," O'Connor says. "The vast majority of people who aren't pregnant, they should worry more about getting a bad sunburn on Ipanema Beach because the sun is so strong there."

He expects that people who contract the virus while not pregnant will recover and develop a resistance to future infections. "It's like getting chickenpox as a kid so you wouldn't get it as an adult," O'Connor says.

"Until that happens, there's going to be a lot of heartache," he adds. How devastating and far-reaching will the effects be? We don't know the answer to that," O'Connor says, adding that scientists are certain of one thing. "The earlier the public health response, the better."