Patrick S. Moore

Patrick S. Moore 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.

Dr. Moore received a MS from Stanford University, an MD from the University of Utah, and an MPH 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, Operation Restore Hope. He received the CDC Langmuir Prize for his work on epidemic meningitis control.

After leaving CDC, he 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. 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. He is now director of the Molecular Virology Program at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. He has been awarded the Robert Koch Prize, the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation Charles S. Mott Prize, and the Meyenberg Cancer Research Prize.