Patrick S. Moore

Patrick S. Moore (born October 21, 1956) is an American virologist and epidemiologist who co-discovered the cause of the AIDS-related cancer Kaposi's sarcoma along with his wife, Yuan Chang. The couple met while in medical school together and were married in 1989 while they pursued fellowships at different universities.

Moore received an M.S. degree from Stanford University, an M.D. degree from the University of Utah, and an M.P.H. degree from the University of California, Berkeley. As an epidemiologist working at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he developed widely used international guidelines to control meningococcal meningitis epidemics and led a team of CDC epidemiologists during the 1992 Somali Civil War. Civilian death rates documented during this civil war-famine were among the highest ever reported. The extreme mortality statistics helped to solidify international support behind the US-led military intervention, [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/9/newsid_4013000/4013143.stm Operation Restore Hope] . He received the CDC Langmuir Prize for his work on epidemic meningitis control.

After leaving CDC, Moore served briefly as the New York City Epidemiologist but quit to search for new human viruses with his wife, Yuan Chang who was then a newly-appointed assistant professor at Columbia University [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18398088?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum] . Unemployed, he worked in his wife's laboratory, allowing him to rapidly pick up training in molecular biology. Despite having no research funding, Moore and Chang used a new molecular biology technique, Representational Difference Analysis, to search for a virus causing Kaposi's sarcoma, the most common malignancy among AIDS patients. In 1994, they discovered a new human herpesvirus, KSHV, in a KS tumor and along with several collaborators showed that it was the etiologic agent of Kaposi's sarcoma, primary effusion lymphoma, and multicentric Castleman's disease. Moore was hired onto the faculty at Columbia and the Chang-Moore Laboratory secured research funding to investigate this new virus. They subsequently sequenced KSHV, identified oncogenes encoded by the virus, demonstrated transmission during transplantation and developed diagnostic tests to detect infection. His laboratory currently seeks to understand the role of tumor virus immunoevasion of the innate immune system as a cause for viral tumorigenesis. In 2002, he moved his laboratory to the University of Pittsburgh where he is the director of the Molecular Virology Program at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. Chang and Moore jointly developed a new technique to find human tumor viruses called digital transcriptome subtraction (DTS) [http://jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/full/81/20/11332?view=long&pmid=17686852] . Using this approach, they identified the most recently discovered human polyomavirus infecting Merkel cell carcinoma. This virus is the likely cause of Merkel cell carcinoma and hence is named Merkel cell polyomavirus [http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5866/1096] .

He has been awarded the Robert Koch Prize, the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation Charles S. Mott Prize [http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20030610mott0610p1.asp] , and the Meyenberg Cancer Research Prize.

References

[http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/100/8/524 *Scmidt C. Yuan Chang and Patrick Moore: teaming up to hunt down cancer-causing viruses. J Natl Cancer Instit 2008;100:524-5]

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=7997879&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_DocSum * Chang Y, Cesarman E, Pessin M, et al. Identification of herpesvirus-like DNA sequences in AIDS-associated Kaposi's sarcoma. Science 1994;266:1865-9.]

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=7700310&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_DocSum * Moore PS, Chang Y. Detection of herpesvirus-like DNA sequences in Kaposi's sarcoma in patients with and without HIV infection. N Engl J Med 1995;332(18):1181-5.]

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=8096276&query_hl=5&itool=pubmed_docsum *Moore PS, Marfin AA, Quenemoen LE, et al. Mortality rates in displaced and resident populations of central Somalia during 1992 famine. Lancet 1993; 341:935-8.]

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=8962146&query_hl=7&itool=pubmed_docsum *Russo JJ, Bohenzky RA, Chien MC, et al. Nucleotide sequence of the Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (HHV8). Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 1996; 93:14862-7.]

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=7997865&query_hl=10&itool=pubmed_docsum *Moore PS, Broome CV. Cerebrospinal meningitis epidemics 1994;271:38-45.]