Thomas C. Merigan

Thomas Charles Merigan is an American virologist and the George E. and Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine, Emeritus at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Merigan's research first focused on viral pathogenesis, basic and clinical studies of interferon, and then developing the first systemically active antiviral drugs including those effectively treatIng HIV/AIDS. He is also credited with helping to develop the use of interferons as antiviral and antitumor therapies.[1] Merigan joined the Stanford faculty in 1963 and assumed full emeritus status in 2007. In 2004 he was also identified as one of the 250 most cited investigators in clinical medicine over the last 20 years by the Institute for Scientific Information.[2] He had over 100 postdoctoral fellows, students and visiting scientists with whom he published 576 papers, 24 books and published symposia, and held 11 US patents. His students have become leaders in the fields of infectious diseases and microbiology both in the US and the world. He was a board member of 28 journals and a member of 23 learned societies. He told his life story in a book entitled Pioneering Viral Therapy,a Life in Academic Medicine, published by Amazon/Kindle/CreateSpace in 2017.

Education

Merigan was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with honors in 1955. He attended medical school at the University of California, San Francisco,where he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha Honorary Medical Society and received his M.D. in 1958. He did his internship and residency on the Harvard medical services at Boston City Hospital and then moved to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda where he trained for 3 years in protein chemistry in Nobelist Christian Anfinsen's laboratory.[2]

Academic career

Merigan joined the faculty at Stanford in 1963. His first sabbatical leave was spent at the MRC Common Cold Unit in Salisbury,England in 1970 with David Tyrell and Sir Christopher Andrews under a Guggenheim fellowship. He received the Borden Award for outstanding research from the Association of American Medical Colleges in 1973. Another overseas sabbatical was spent studying interferon with Charles Chany in Paris. He became involved in administration at Stanford and headed the Division of Infectious Diseases there, founded the Stanford University Hospital Clinical Virology Laboratory in 1969, one of the first of its type in the world and in 1988 founded the Center for AIDS Research at Stanford. The antivirals he collaborated in the development of included those directed against herpesviruses (CMV, VZ and HSV), hepatitis B, papovaviruses, rhinoviruses, HIV, and rabies.They were carried out not just at Stanford but on 6 of the 7 continents of the world. His interferon studies included finding the first positive treatment results in multiple sclerosis which encouraged others to find even better effects in this disease with even less toxic drugs. His group also developed and holds patents thru Stanford University on the methods for monitoring the effects of treatment of HIV which are still used today. Due to his involvement in the study of HIV/AIDS, he also became involved in government initiatives; he was a principal investigator and initial chair of the Primary Infection Committee in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) AIDS Clinical Trials Group which evaluated the first active antiviral drugs against HIV and proved the better action of combination over mono therapy of HIV infection in large scale multinational studies. He served on several NIH study sections, FDA Committees and as a member of NIAID's Board of Scientific Counselors. He held grants from that Institute from the day in 1963 he started at Stanford until he retired nearly 45 years later. In 1988 he received a ten year MERIT award from the NIAID and received the Maxwell Finland Lectureship award from IDSA. He gave a number of named endowed lectureships and also on several occasions testified before congressional committees on the subject of federal funding for AIDS and cancer research. In 1980 Merigan became the first George E. and Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He was made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Society for Microbiology, Infectious Diseases Society of America, and American Society of Virology as well as elected into Honorary membership in the International Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research in 2001 .[2] He served as a member of the Council of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and a member of the Association of American Physicians. Tom served as a member of several scientific award groups including the Lasker Awards Committee. He also was boarded in Internal Medicine. Merigan was among the group of American virologists who helped organize and became the founding members of the American Society for Virology.[3][4]

Merigan was also interested in entrepreneurship throughout his career and served on the scientific advisory boards of a number of big pharma and biotechnology companies, Including that of Cetus Corporation in 1979.[2]

In 1994 he was honored when his friends and fellows established an annual lectureship in his name which supported over 23 visiting lecturers to date. In 2004, Merigan assumed active emeritus status in the Stanford faculty, celebrated by a Festschrift in his honor later published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.(2) He remained active in research until he retired fully in 2007.[2] The following year he and his wife endowed the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Chair in infectious diseases at Stanford, currently held by David Relman.[5]

References

1. Toine, Pieters (15 March 2005). Interferon: The Science and Selling of a Miracle Drug. Routledge. ISBN 9781134293056.
2. Holodniy, Mark; Katzenstein, David (15 September 2006). "Bridging Generations: Understanding Pathogenesis Leads to New Infectious Diseases Therapies and Diagnostics—Introduction and Dedication". The Journal of Infectious Diseases. 194 (s1): S1–S2. doi:10.1086/505354. PMID 16921465.
3. Joklik WK, Grossberg SE (2006). "How the American Society for Virology was founded". Virology. 344 (1): 250–7. doi:10.1016/j.virol.2005.09.022. PMID 16364755.
4. Joklik, WK (9 December 2005). "Adventures of a biochemist in virology". The Journal of Biological Chemistry. 280 (49): 40385–97. doi:10.1074/jbc.x500005200. PMID 16326717.
5. "David Relman". Stanford University School of Medicine. Retrieved 23 August 2016.