Interview with Dr. Kenneth Maiese—Author of a Highly Cited Paper in Bioengineering

The following is an interview with Dr. Kenneth Maiese:

1. Can you tell me about your background and what your research areas are?

I was born and raised in New Jersey, United States, and was fortunate to be the Valedictorian of my high school class at Pennsauken High School. I then graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Summa Cum Laude with Distinction and was subsequently a Teagle Scholar, Grupe Scholar, and Joseph Collins Scholar at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Thereafter, I trained as a physician-scientist at Cornell, the National Institutes of Health, and as a senior executive in Executive Leadership and Business Administration at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Through my training, I have gained extensive experience in academic medicine, healthcare delivery, business development, managed care, biotechnology, and drug development holding positions as member and advisor for the National Institutes of Health Biotechnology and Venture Capital Development, National Institutes of Health Innovation Network, Chief Scientific Officer, Chief Medical Officer, tenured Professor and Chairman and Physician-in-Chief of the Department of Neurology and Neurosciences of Rutgers University, Global Head of Translational Medicine and External Innovation, Board Member of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Steering Committee Member for the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, tenured Professor in Neurology, Anatomy & Cell Biology, Molecular Medicine, the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Health Center at Wayne State University, and Founding Editor and Editor-in-Chief of multiple highly successful international journals. I maintain clinical and scientific expertise in multiple medical disciplines, regulatory policy, and drug commercialization. My work has elucidated a number of new avenues for the fruitful discovery of innovative strategies to treat neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disorders, metabolic dysfunction, and cancer and has led to the development of first-in-class pharmaceuticals. As a result, I am grateful for the awards that I have received that include the Hoechst Award for exceptional basic science work, as well as being named a Johnson & Johnson Distinguished Investigator, chosen as a Henrietta B. and Frederick H. Bugher Foundation Investigator, receiving the Albrecht Fleckenstein Memorial Award for Distinguished Achievement in Basic Research, elected to America's Top Physicians and The Best of U.S. Physicians, recipient of Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award, elected as an America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Executive Leadership Fellow, recognized as an international highly impactful expert in cell death pathways and Alzheimer’s Disease, and my work has been recognized with the distinction of "High Impact Research and Potential Public Health Benefit" by the National Institutes of Health.

2. What made you decide to publish a Bioengineering article?
I decided to publish in Bioengineering because the journal has a broad scope for demonstrating new advancements in biology and medicine. The journal focuses on high-priority issues that involve biomolecular pathways, cellular, metabolic, and genetic pathways, nanotechnology, and translational engineering applications.

3. Was it important to you that the journal is open access?
Yes, having Bioengineering as an open access journal is extremely important. Open access publishing increases readership accessibility and advances the distribution of knowledge while developing current and future research collaborations.

4. What do you hope that readers will get from your paper?
I believe that the paper highlights a number of key concepts. It is important to realize that approximately three million individuals suffer from multiple sclerosis (MS) throughout the world. It is a severe demyelinating disease in the nervous system with increased prevalence over the last five decades, and only recently has MS also been recognized as a significant etiology of cognitive loss and dementia. Dementia has now become the 7th leading cause of death in the world. Loss of cognitive function in MS occurs in approximately sixty-five percent of individuals and can affect processing of information, attention, and memory recall in these patients, leading to severe disability.

5. What critical scientific or engineering problems did your research initially aim to address?
Multiple cellular mechanisms may lead to the onset and progression of MS, such as inflammatory mediators, demyelination and remyelination pathways, oxidative stress, blood–brain barrier impairment, viral antigens, and cellular metabolism dependent upon nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+). Although disease-modifying therapy (DMT) can limit the rate of relapse in MS patients, it cannot prevent disease progression. In addition, early initiation of DMTs may slow the progression of brain volume loss, but cognitive disability may continue to progress. For these reasons, it is incumbent for us to develop new and innovative avenues for the investigation and treatment of MS. The paper brings to light a number of novel pathways that involve autophagy, apoptosis, mammalian forkhead transcription factors (FoxOs), the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR), AMP activated protein kinase (AMPK), the silent mating type information regulation 2 homolog 1 (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) (SIRT1), and associated pathways with the apolipoprotein E (APOE-ε4) gene and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) to offer promise for the understanding and treatment of cognitive loss in MS.

6. Are there follow-up studies planned based on this paper’s findings?
Additional future investigations will be necessary to further understand the complexity of autophagy, apoptosis, FoxOs, mTOR, AMPK, SIRT1, APOE-ε4 gene, and SARS-CoV-2 pathways since they are intimately connected, can have complementary as well as inverse relationships, and can affect multiple biological pathways such as cerebral blood flow, inflammation, stem cell survival, and glucose homeostasis.

7. Why do you think this article has been highly cited?
I believe two factors may be important for the high interest in the paper. First, the developing clinical recognition that MS is not just a disease of the sensory and motor systems of the nervous system, but MS is also a severe disorder that progressively affects cognitive function, and this dementia ultimately leads to additional disability and eventual demise in these MS patients. Second, although multiple underlying cellular pathways may lead to the onset and progression of MS such as inflammatory pathways, it is also becoming evident that the complexity of the pathology can lead to MS and the requirement for the elucidation and understanding of critical novel pathways can play a role in understanding and treating demyelinating disease for the development of new DMTs.

8. How is AI reshaping bioengineering research in disruptive ways?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning models can be disruptive but offer the potential for highly positive results especially for the field of bioengineering. AI can be used to synthesize enormous data sets that can be heterogeneous in nature, such as involving genetic and proteomic data that involve multiple cellular pathways. Such large and diffuse data sets can present a challenge for traditional statistical methods, but AI and Machine Learning models can assimilate multiple pieces of multiparametric information that is nonhomogeneous to produce predicative signatures for underlying cellular pathways that in the long run can be translated into information that can be applied to the comprehension of clinical biology and treatments for patients.