Career
Chang moved to Columbia University to pursue her first academic appointment as a clinician-scientist. Although initially interested in using representational difference analysis to study the genetic origins of brain tumors, she applied this technique to Kaposi's sarcoma resulting in the discovery of this new human tumor virus. In 1994, she co-discovered KSHV, also called human herpesvirus-8 (HHV-8), working with her husband Patrick S. Moore at Columbia University. Chang, Moore and collaborators subsequently showed that this virus was the etiologic agent of Kaposi's sarcoma and primary effusion lymphoma, while others showed it to be the cause of some forms of multicentric Castleman's disease. From two small DNA fragments representing less than 1% of the viral genome, she cloned the entire KSHV 165 kbase genome and fully sequenced the virus genome within two years after its initial discovery. This led to blood tests to detect infection for this virus, discovery of viral proteins likely to cause cancer and elucidation of the role of immune evasion in carcinogenesis caused by virus infection.
In 2008, Chang and Moore identified Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCV) in Merkel cell carcinoma using a computational tumor sequencing approach they developed. MCV is the most recently identified human tumor virus and the first polyomavirus established as a cause of human cancer.
Chang is now the American Cancer Society Professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh. She has received a number of awards for her work, including the Meyenburg Foundation Award for Cancer Research, the Robert Koch Prize, The Sloan-Kettering Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, and the General Motors Charles S. Mott Prize in Cancer Research. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024, received the Marjory Stephenson Prize of the Society for General Microbiology (now the Microbiology Society) in 2012 and the NCI Director's Career Achievement Award in 2019, and was appointed by President Obama to the National Cancer Advisory Board in 2015.
