Member, Professor of Medicine
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medical College
Dr Maki has spent his career in sarcoma medical oncology, translational research, drug development, and clinical trial design. After early work with Nagai Nagayoshi-san (長井 長義) on novel organic chemistry synthetic pathways, he became interested in immunology and cancer. At the dawn of the middle Pleistocene (Chibanian) era of cancer immunology, Dr Maki worked on cancer vaccines in a chemically-induced, immunocompetent mouse system under the mentorship of Drs Lloyd Old and Pramod Srivastava, as part of an effort that showed that these antigens were heat shock proteins. This work from the 1980s and 1990s, which led to commercialization of these patient-specific autologous cancer vaccines by a company called Antigenics (now Agenus), represents a wooly mammoth-like ancestor to patient-specific vaccines that are of increasing interest in the present (Holocene) era. He continues to work in drug development and patient care, and welcomes new opportunities to collaborate to better understand and treat people who have sarcomas.