The University of Osaka · Medicine
Professor Taigo Kato's research lab specializes in cancer immunology and translational immunotherapy, focusing on the role of T cell responses in kidney and breast cancers. The lab investigates neoantigen-specific T cell immunity, immune checkpoint blockade, and the tumor microenvironment using advanced next-generation sequencing to decode T cell receptor repertoires and tumor heterogeneity. Key research directions include developing donor-derived T cell therapies, understanding cryoablation-induced systemic anti-tumor immunity, and exploring kinase signaling pathways (e.g., TOPK/MELK) that regulate cancer stemness and immune evasion. The lab also explores the immunomodulatory potential of mesenchymal stromal cells, particularly through TSG-6 secretion, for applications in transplantation and cancer immunotherapy.
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Neoantigens are the main targets of tumor-specific T cells reactivated by immune checkpoint-blocking antibodies or when using tumor-infiltrating T cells for adoptive therapy. While cancers often accumulate hundreds of mutations and harbor several immunogenic neoantigens, the repertoire of mutation-specific T cells in patients might be restricted. To bypass suboptimal conditions, which impede the reactivation of existing T cells or the priming of neoantigen-specific T cells in a patient, we emplo
Cryoablation is one of treatment modalities for kidney cancer and is expected to induce strong local immune responses as well as systemic T-cell-mediated immune reactions that may lead to the regression of distant metastatic lesions. Thus, the characterization of T cell repertoire and immune environment in tumors before and after treatment should contribute to the better understanding of the cryoablation-induced anticancer immune responses. In this study, we collected tumor tissues from 22 kidne
T-lymphokine-activated killer cell-originated protein kinase (TOPK) and maternal embryonic leucine zipper kinase (MELK) have been reported to play critical roles in cancer cell proliferation and maintenance of stemness. In this study, we investigated possible roles of TOPK and MELK in kidney cancer cells and found their growth promotive effect as well as some feedback mechanism between these two molecules. Interestingly, the blockade of either of these two kinases effectively caused downregulati
Our findings clearly showed that ADSCs attenuated acute rejection by secreting TSG-6 as well as through direct cell interaction. These findings contribute to the clinical application of these cells in solid organ transplantation.
Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) offer significant clinical benefits to a subset of cancer patients via the induction of a systemic T cell-mediated anti-cancer immune response. Thus, the dynamic characterization of T cell repertoires in the peripheral blood has the potential to demonstrate noninvasive predictive biomarkers for the clinical efficacy of ICIs. In this study, we collected tumor tissues and peripheral blood samples from 25 patients with advanced kidney cancer before anti-programme
Next-generation sequencing technology enables us to analyze the complexity of intra- and inter-tumoral heterogeneity, which may influence to prognosis of cancer patients. In this study, we collected surgically-resected tumor tissues from five breast cancer patients and characterized three different portions of individual tumors through somatic mutation analysis by whole exome sequencing, T cell receptor beta (TCRB) repertoire analysis of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), and the expression
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