The program project grant team (left to right): Nathan Sherer, PhD, Shannon C. Kenney, MD, Paul F. Lambert, PhD ’85, Janet E. Mertz, PhD, Eric C. Johannsen, MD, Paul Ahlquist, PhD ’81, Daniel Loeb, PhD, and Bill Sugden, PhD.
2018-19 was a banner year for McArdle’s Cancer Virology program.
First, the program renewed a ~$10 million NIH program grant, “Molecular Biology and Genetics of Human Tumor Viruses,” funded by the National Cancer Institute, to continue to study how viruses cause 15-20% of all human cancers (Professor Paul Lambert, Principal Investigator; Paul Ahlquist, Eric Johannsen, Shannon Kenney, Daniel Loeb, Janet Mertz, Nate Sherer, and Bill Sugden). This program project grant (P01) was first envisioned by the late Howard Temin (Nobel Prize, 1975) and has been continually funded groundbreaking cancer virus research at McArdle for more than 40 years.
Second, UW-Madison hosted at two major international cancer virology conferences held in back-to-back weeks; the International Conference on Epstein-Barr Virus and Kaposi’s Sarcoma Herpesvirus (organized, in part, by McArdle Professors Eric Johannsen, Shannon Kenney, and Janet Mertz) and the annual DNA Tumor Virus Meeting (organized, in part, by Professor Paul Lambert). McArdlites contributed to the more than 200 projects at these meetings (~120 oral presentations and >140 scientific posters).
A recent article in SMPH’s Quarterly magazine summarizes these achievements.