STEM-Talk: Kevin Tracey on bioelectrical medicine and inflammation’s toll

Few people know as much about inflammation and neuroscience as Dr. Kevin Tracey does.

So how does he explain what inflammation — whose identification can be traced to the time of Galen — means to human health?

“Every year, 60 million people die on Earth,” he says. “Two-thirds of them — 40 million people — die of a disease caused or made worse by inflammation.”

That’s why he sees inflammation as “the single major threat to long healthspan because it contributes to the major killers and major unsolved diseases on the planet.”

In the latest episode of STEM-Talk, available now wherever you listen to podcasts, we learn much from Tracey, who was the first to identify the inflammatory reflex, a physiological mechanism that regulates the body’s immune response to injury and invasion.

He is a neurosurgeon, a pioneer in bioelectrical medicine and president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y.

The conversation in this episode covers a career spent working on “producing tomorrow’s cures today” in the treatment of inflammatory diseases, including:

• How the death of his mother from a brain tumor when Tracey was 5 years old ultimately influenced his scientific journey.
• How the death of a young patient of his from sepsis further fueled his path, leading him to the insight that “good science begins with hard questions,” as Tracey shared in a TedTalk.
• The molecular mechanisms of inflammation and the use of vagus nerve stimulation to treat it.
• His 1987 discovery of tumor necrosis factor (TNF), which contributed to a new class of drugs for inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.
• Another discovery that allowed him and his colleagues to merge neuroscience and immunology.
• His work on “The Inflammatory Reflex”, which emphasized the basic neural pathway that reflexively monitors and adjusts the inflammatory response.
• A sketch he drew while having lunch, which laid out how treating inflammatory diseases using a bioelectronic device might be possible.
• What advances in bioelectronic medicine he envisions in the next decade, and much more.

Tracey says he chose medical school because “I wanted my science to be in the context of inventing therapies. Making new drugs, making new treatments. To do that I needed to learn how disease works, how pathology works.”

IHMC is a not-for-profit research institute of the Florida University System where researchers pioneer science and technology aimed at leveraging and extending human capabilities. IHMC researchers and staff collaborate extensively with the government, industry and academia to help develop breakthrough technologies. IHMC research partners have included: DARPA, the National Science Foundation, NASA, Army, Navy, Air Force, National Institutes of Health, IBM, Microsoft, Honda, Boeing, Lockheed, and many others.