Doctoral Student Coauthored Research That Could Transform Cancer Treatment

Maciej Jeziorek is helping to advance breakthrough biomedical research at Rutgers-Newark before even completing his degree

As a doctoral student at Rutgers-Newark, Maciej Jeziorek has already accomplished what many scientists take years to achieve: He has coauthored eight biomedical academic papers, including research that could transform the treatment of cancer.

Over the past three years, Jeziorek was a key collaborator on a groundbreaking nanotechnology, published last December in Nature Communications, which offers a new approach for cancer research. The project demonstrated that RNA molecules can assemble themselves into precise shapes inside living human cells and potentially be programmed to stop the propagation of harmful cells.

"Maciej has a drive for science that is unparalleled to many other students," says Jean-Pierre Etchegaray, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Rutgers-Newark and Jeziorek's thesis advisor. "He's the type of scientist in the making who will do well, no matter where he goes."

Jeziorek emigrated from Poland at the age of 14, three years after his mother, who was widowed, arrived in the United States hoping to find a better life. His mother found work as a house cleaner and settled in Wallington, Bergen County, a community known as "Little Warsaw" because of its large concentration of Polish Americans.

In high school, Jeziorek says he had no idea what he wanted to study in college, so he decided to enroll in Bergen Community College. After stumbling upon some classes in anatomy, microbiology and physiology, he discovered his love for science.

He transferred to Rutgers-Newark as a biology major, and in his second year, he took a course in molecular biotechniques that would change his life. Students in the class spent the entire semester creating a DNA sequence and attaching a fluorescent tag to a protein to track it inside a human cell.

"The whole process was just fascinating and that was just scratching the surface of what other techniques and knowledge are out there," says Jeziorek, who is now a teaching assistant for the course.

Susan Seipel, an assistant teaching professor who led the class, saw how engaged Jeziorek was and suggested that he join a research project. Just a few months before graduating, Jeziorek, an honors student with a 4.0 GPA, began working with former Assistant Professor Radek Dobrowolski, who was studying the causes of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.

He followed his professor to the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, where he hoped he would spend a year working as his research assistant. But five months later, family drew him back to New Jersey when his stepfather died.

With the world of molecular science just opening up to him, Jeziorek decided to begin working on a doctoral degree at Rutgers-Newark so he could continue his research. "It's just amazing how complicated life is on the molecular level," he says. "And the more we think we understand something, there's always more questions arising."

In the RNA nanotechnology collaboration published in Nature Communications, Jeziorek drew on what he learned in his molecular biotechniques course at Rutgers-taking a DNA sequence, processing it and delivering it into human cells. In this case, the DNA sequence instructs the RNA molecules to fold into different shapes inside a live human cell, and the new structure can then be used for different biomedical applications, such as potentially disabling cancer cells.

The technology, which has received a provisional patent from the university, is a joint project led by Etchegaray and Fei Zhang, an associate professor of chemistry at Rutgers-Newark, whose lab developed the synthetic RNA structure that has been encoded into human cells.

Zhang estimates that she has collaborated with more than 100 graduate students over the past decade, and she ranks Jeziorek among the top three. "He's always one step ahead and trying to troubleshoot experimental hurdles," she says. "He is such a dedicated, hardworking and mature scientist."

In addition to his collaboration with faculty and other students, Jeziorek has continued work on his dissertation, which focuses on a specific long non-coding RNA and its ability to help human stem cells maintain pluripotency - their ability to differentiate into any cell type in the body.

His research-the first to identify the presence of this long non-coding RNA in human pluripotent stem cells-could have implications for aging, regenerative medicine and the understanding of how stem cells function in the body.

After earning his doctoral degree next year, Jeziorek hopes to work as a bench scientist, either in a university or in industry. His goal is to lead a team of scientists, modeling the same collaborative approach he found in Etchegaray's lab.

"Dr. Etchegaray formed this warm culture in his lab where we all help each other solve problems and troubleshoot together," Jeziorek says. "That's definitely the style I will want to follow in the future."