J. William Harbour is an American ophthalmologist, ocular oncologist and cancer researcher. He is Chair of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. He previously served as the vice chair and director of ocular oncology at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute and associate director for basic science at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center of the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine.
Harbour's clinical practice focuses on intraocular tumors, including uveal (ocular) melanoma, retinoblastoma, lymphoma and other neoplasms. His field of research includes the genetics and genomics of cancer, with a focus on prognostic biomarkers, mechanisms of metastasis, and molecular targeted therapies. He has given over 300 invited scientific lectures, and published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters. Harbour founded the Ocular Oncology Service at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where he was the Paul A. Cibis Distinguished Professor of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences.
Early life and education
J. William Harbour is a native of Dallas, Texas. He graduated from Hillcrest High School and earned his undergraduate degree in biochemistry at Texas A&M University, where he graduated. Harbour then attended medical school at Johns Hopkins, where he developed a keen interest in cancer biology. He completed medical school in 1990, followed by ophthalmology residency at the Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, clinical fellowship in vitreoretinal diseases and surgery at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, and ocular oncology fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.
Medical career
Harbour accepted a position as assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he remained for 16 years and rose through the ranks to the title of Paul A. Cibis Distinguished Professor of Ophthalmology, professor of medicine and professor of cell biology and physiology. In 2012, he was recruited to the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute and Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center of the University of Miami as professor of ophthalmology, biochemistry and molecular biology. He served as vice chair for translational research, medical director of the echography and clinical research units, and director of ocular oncology at Bascom Palmer, and associate director for basic research at Sylvester. He established the Bascom Palmer ocular oncology fellowship program and served as the fellowship director.
Research
Harbour developed a keen interest in research during his undergraduate years at Texas A&M, where he studied the function of the copper protein ceruloplasmin in the laboratory of Dr. Edward Harris. During medical school at Johns Hopkins, he was accepted to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute–National Institutes of Health (HHMI–NIH) Research Scholars Program in Bethesda, MD, where he carried out research in the National Cancer Institute laboratory of Dr. John Minna. This research resulted in a breakthrough discovery published in the journal Science in 1988, with Harbour as first author. Previously it had been thought that mutations in the retinoblastoma gene, the first tumor suppressor gene to be discovered, would be limited to the rare eye cancer retinoblastoma. However, Harbour and co-authors showed that the gene was commonly mutated in a common form of lung cancer. This discovery added to increasing recognition of the retinoblastoma tumor suppressor pathway as a common target of mutation in the vast majority of human cancers.
When Harbour joined Washington University in 1996, he undertook a three-year postdoctoral research training program in molecular oncology, which resulted in a first author publication in the journal Cell showing that the retinoblastoma protein is regulated by successive phosphorylation events. This discovery was subsequently corroborated by protein crystallography and other lines of investigation and have helped to explain how some cancer cells inactivate the retinoblastoma protein by phosphorylation rather than mutation.