Department of Molecular Pathology

Pathology is one of the oldest medical fields, and currently serves as a bridge between basic medicine and clinical medicine. It is a medical field in which "translational research" is conducted, in which questions obtained from the patient's pathology and collected tissues are clarified through research and applied to the clinical field. Pathology, which studies tissues, tends to have a classical impression, but recent remarkable technological innovations have made it possible to observe the "spatial distribution" of transcription products, metabolites, epigenetic changes, and many types of proteins with high resolution on a single tissue section, which could previously only be examined from collected cell masses. Pathology, whose research centers on "spatial understanding of tissues," is a medical field that is expected to develop dramatically in the future.

In this context, we are working to elucidate the mechanisms of cancer metastasis and invasion based on insights gained from morphological observation of cancer tissue. In particular, we are working to elucidate the mechanisms of cancer progression from the perspective of interactions between tumor metabolism, signal transduction pathways, and epigenetics. We aim to develop new treatments and diagnostic methods and apply them to clinical practice.

Our laboratory is currently working on the following research:

In this study, we aim to clarify the changes in the metabolic dynamics of colorectal cancer cells that promote metastasis to other organs, which have environments completely different from that of the primary tumor, and to develop treatments that suppress and cure the metastasis of colorectal cancer.

Thanks to the development of metabolite measurement techniques such as metabolome analysis, cancer cell-specific metabolism has been revealed one after another in recent years, and attempts have been made to develop treatments targeting these, but few of these have been applied clinically. One of the reasons for this is the metabolic plasticity of cancer cells. In this study, we first focus on glutaminolysis, which is important for cancer cell proliferation, and elucidate the metabolic and signaling pathways that are activated compensatory when glutamine metabolic enzymes and glutamine transporters are inhibited, and develop cancer treatments that combine these inhibitors.