Alzheimer's Pioneer: Michael Weiner
Fueled by his curiosity, persistence in the face of obstacles, and a personal philosophy to “do good, help people, and have a good time,” Michael Weiner, MD, has reinvented his scientific focus more than once during his now half-century-long career. In 1980, Weiner was an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Nephrology) at Stanford, researching kidney metabolism at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center. He thought that his grants and publications, in addition to his Young Investigator Award from the American College of Cardiology, meant his career growth at Stanford was a sure thing.
Being passed over for tenure at Stanford was a shock that in retrospect turned out to be, as Weiner recalls, “the best gift I ever received.” Soon after this disappointment, Floyd Rector, MD, who was Chair of Nephrology at UCSF, offered Weiner the position of Associate Professor of medicine and Chief of Hemodialysis at the VA Medical Center. During his last few months at Stanford, Weiner got the idea to study the metabolism of the rat kidney using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy on the rat kidney with an implanted radiofrequency coil. This proved to be one of the first experiments to perform NMR on an intact animal. He brought this technology to UCSF, where, he says,
Weiner credits UCSF and the VA for providing a welcoming scientific home for his career: “Not getting tenure at Stanford was heart-breaking. But a scientist has to adapt and take advantage of the unexpected. All my success has happened at UCSF, and the VA has been incredibly supportive. I owe my entire career to these institutions.”
As he developed his MR imaging program at the VA, Weiner’s interests quickly expanded from nephrology to brain health. In the late 1980s, knowing that to secure consistent research funding he needed to “pick a disease,” Weiner’s interest in aging and brain scans led him to focus on Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease had both a spotlight in public health and reliable grant money, as well as a tantalizingly unsolved puzzle: it could not be diagnosed in living patients. Weiner was at the forefront of this research and wrote UCSF’s first NIH grant for imaging Alzheimer’s disease.
Never content with only academic research, Weiner has been involved in several public-private partnerships beginning with Synarc in the late 1990s. Synarc was founded by UCSF faculty to develop bone-density imaging products, resolving the conflict between the realities of university staffing and the trial-by-trial nature of grant funding. Weiner collaborated with Harry Genant, MD, to form a neurology division at Synarc to focus on Alzheimer’s disease, observing that, “The point of research is to make advances that are translated to help people’s lives. When any discovery reaches the patient, it will be coming from a private company.”
Weiner’s next great advance, the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), is also a public-private partnership co-funded by the NIH and pharmaceutical and diagnostic companies. Since 2004, ADNI has been the largest multi-site longitudinal study on Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment and dementia. This unique sample pool, which follows healthy and symptomatic patients for years and often decades, offers invaluable data from people as they first develop symptoms of mild cognitive impairment. The deidentified data are available to the entire scientific community on the ADNI website with no embargo leading to over 5500 publications to date. ADNI was followed by the Brain Health Registry (BHR), an internet-based registry involving more than 100,000 participants, designed to accelerate development of effective treatments for brain diseases, which was a landmark in its use of all-online data collection for medical research.
Looking back at these initiatives, Weiner described the incredible demand for data from the many companies pivoting into immunotherapy and imaging, “It was like getting on a rocket ship. The growth and success of ADNI was amazing.” In 2011, the Alzheimer’s Association presented the Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Award to ADNI and in 2021, Dr. Weiner was awarded the Henry Wisniewski Lifetime Achievement Award in Alzheimer’s Disease Research by the Alzheimer’s Association.
“How does this help patients?” is the underlying question that animates Weiner’s work. In 2020, he established the ADNI Diversity Taskforce to improve recruitment of underrepresented research participants. Similarly, the BHR has pioneered initiatives to recruit underrepresented communities such as the CEDAR study, which aims to increase engagement by Black participants, and the California Latino Brain Health Registry. As Weiner says, “even ADNI is not representative, and this problem is present across the entire medical research field. We need to engage and enroll people from underrepresented communities into research to better serve patients.”
Perhaps unusually for a principal investigator, Weiner is also an ADNI study participant. For the past 18 years, he has come in for clinical tests, samples, and scans, observing that, “It is not for my benefit. Participating myself can show that the process is not scary and illustrates how it contributes to the common good.”
With that attention to the common good in research, Weiner is especially proud of his role as a mentor to hundreds of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows (120+) including Alan Koretsky, PhD, Greg Karczmar, PhD, Hoby Hetherington, PhD, Anthony Baker, MD, and a great number of faculty, including Linda Chao, PhD, Susanne Mueller, MD, Duygu Tosun, PhD, Rachel Nosheny, PhD, and Scott Mackin, PhD. Weiner describes this true passion: “Mentoring students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty is my single most important function at UCSF. People can grow and adapt quickly, so we mentors must adapt with them. Most of all, I try to mentor by example rather than by instruction.”
Weiner’s avocations are further expressions of his interests in health and originality. A member of the Dolphin Club in the Marina District, Weiner routinely swims in the open water of the San Francisco Bay, even in January. To those skeptical about taking the plunge, he insists, “Swimming in the morning makes you feel better all day long. It really wakes you up.” An accomplished jazz pianist, Weiner has provided entertainment at functions for UCSF, the VA, and various charities. “In a way,” he says, “jazz is like science in that it is problem solving. You explore, improvise, discover new things, and test hypotheses. The goal is always to create something new.” As a teenager, Weiner discovered jazz when he hopped a bus down to New York City’s Greenwich Village, where a friend’s father owned a nightclub. There, Weiner heard Count Basie and Thelonious Monk and was seized with the desire to learn to play as they did. His bands in high school and college were largely “just noise,” but after his own two children left for college, Weiner decided to give jazz another serious effort. Thirty years later, he now plays in San Francisco venues such as Pier 23. He has been happily married to his wife Barbara for more than 61 years.
Now, as an emeritus professor at UCSF though still active with ADNI, Weiner is grateful to the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging and to the leaders who supported him and his research over the years: “We are extremely fortunate to have Christopher Hess as our Chair (I interviewed him back when he applied for residency at UCSF!). It was quite sad to retire from UCSF in June 2023. I had tears, and I am very thankful. Sometimes you appreciate things more once you leave them.”
- Dr. Weiner was named a “Rockstar of Science” in 2011
- 928 peer-reviewed papers
- 152 conference abstracts
- 246 invited lectures since 2010
- Served on 4 editorial boards
- Served on committees of 15 professional organizations, 7 as chair or co-chair
By Francis Horan