Cy A. Stein, MD, PhD

Cy A. Stein, MD, PhD was born in New York City. He received a BA degree from Brown University (1974) and a PhD in chemistry from Stanford (1978) under Henry Taube (Nobel Laureate, 1983). A career change took him to medical school at Albert Einstein (MD, 1982), after which he as an intern and resident in internal medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical Center (1982-85). He then became a fellow in medical oncology at the NCI (1985-88) and remained on staff there until 1990. Returning to NY, he became an assistant and then an associate professor of medicine and pharmacology at Columbia (1990-2003), and then a full professor at Albert Einstein (2003-12). He was then recruited as the Kaplan Professor and Chair of Medical Oncology and Experimental Pharmacology at the City of Hope Medical Center (Duarte, CA). Dr. Stein retired in 2021.

He began working with oligonucleotides in March, 1987, and has published extensively on numerous aspects of oligonucleotide biology and biochemistry, focusing on the behavior of phosphorothioate (PS) oligos. Over the years, his laboratory has examined some of the non-sequence specific behaviors of PS oligos, helping to understand in detail the ability of PS oligos to bind to heparin-binding proteins, and how this binding relates to cellular internalization and intracellular localization. He and his colleagues were also the discoverers of the ability of PS oligos to enter cells and produce gene silencing in the absence of any carriers (i.e., lipids) or other modifications, among his numerous other scientific accomplishments. He has been a frequent speaker at national and international meetings, a member of numerous scientific advisory boards, and either Editor or Co-editor of Nucleic Acid Therapeutics and its predecessors for 21 years. Stein was also one of the founders of the OTS.