Genome Science & Medicine

Hiroyuki ABURATANI

PROFILE

1980-    Medical School, The University of Tokyo (UTokyo)
1980-    Third Department of Internal Medicine, UTokyo Hospital
1983-    Research Associate, Third Department of Internal Medicine, UTokyo Hospital
1988-    Research Fellow, MIT Center for Cancer Research
1995-    Research Associate, Third Department of Internal Medicine, UTokyo Hospital
1999-    Associate Professor, RCAST, UTokyo
2001-    Professor, RCAST, UTokyo
2002-    Professor, Center for Collaborative Research, UTokyo
2006-    Professor, RCAST, UTokyo

FIELD OF INTEREST

We are working with systems biology and medicine to understand complex biological systems through a functional genomics approach. High throughput technology and novel algorithms are required for collecting, integrating and visualizing the enormous amount of data on gene expression, protein expression, and protein interactions arising in the wake of the Human Genome Project. Alliance with external academics and industry will be crucial to the success of the new “systems biology”, that is, understanding biological systems as more than the sum of their parts.


1. Personal cancer genome

The variety of genetic and epigenetic alterations that accumulate in cancer genomes cause activation of oncogenes and inactivation of tumor suppressor genes, leading to cellular transformation. Next generation sequencing technology has enabled us to obtain individual genomic information within feasible cost and time constraints. Since 2008 my group have participated in the International Cancer Genome Consortium and are studying the genomic alterations in liver and pancreatic cancer.


2. Epigenomics

Epigenetic processes are essential for the packaging and interpretation of the genome, fundamental to normal development and cell differentiation, and increasingly recognized as being involved in human disease. Epigenetic mechanisms, which include histone modification, positioning of histone variants, nucleosome remodelling, DNA methylation, and non-coding RNAs, are considered as “cellular memory”. We have applied genomic technologies, such as ChIP-sequencing, to map these epigenetic marks throughout the genome and to elucidate how these marks are written and read.


3. Translational research

Functional genomic approaches are applied to identify novel biomarkers for disease diagnostics and therapeutics.


PUBLICATION