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I am a postdoctoral research fellow (planning to convert into PhD student) in Dr. Scrable's lab in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Virginia.
I graduated from University of Tokyo School of Medicine in 1997 and had been in neurosurgery residency training since then. After 1 year of general surgery internship, I had 2 years of research time with Dr. Gregory Helm, MD, PhD in the Department of Neurosurgery.
There I learned the basic strategy and technique behind the use of adenoviruses in gene therapy. I also performed gene expression profiling of brain tumors called meningiomas and schwannomas, which revealed that genes specifically involved in the interaction between extracellular matrix to cell-surface receptor to cytoskeleton have different expression profiles in tumors in a host organism (patient) and tumor cells grown in culture.
This difference between in vivo and in vitro expression profiles became the impetus for me to develop a system for studying gene function at the organism level that is simple enough to allow the analysis of multiple genes in the same animal. One system that has proved to be very useful in this regard is the RNA interference method for down-regulating gene expression in C. elegance.
One day in our neurosurgery department's conference, Dr. Scrable came and gave a talk about her lac operator-repressor mouse system. I started to think if there is any way to utilize the system for my investigation. Then two ideas, lac operator-repressor mouse system and RNA interference, came together.
I am currently working on a system to regulate RNA interference in vivo using lac operator-repressor mouse system.
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Publications:·
- Sasaki T, Hankins GR, Helm GA: Major Vault Protein/Lung resistance-related protein (MVP/LRP) expression in nervous system tumors. Brain Tumor Pathology 2002 Dec, 19(2) (in press)
- Jane JA Jr., Dunford BA, Kron A, Pittman DD, Sasaki T, Li JZ, Li H, Alden TD, Dayoub H, Hankins GR, Kallmes DF, Helm GA: Ectopic Osteogenesis Using Adenoviral Bone Morphogenetic Protein (BMP)-4 and BMP-6 Gene Transfer. Molecular Thearpy 2002 Oct; 6(4):464
- Sasaki T, Lopes MBS, Hankins GR, Helm GA: Expression of survivin, inhibitor of apoptosis protein, in tumors of the nervous system. Acta Neuropathologica (Berl) 2002 Jul;104(1):105-9
- Sasaki T, Hankins GR, Helm GA: Major Vault Protein/Lung resistance-related protein (MVP/LRP) expression in the central nervous sytem tumors. Neuro-Oncology 2001 Oct; 3(4): 307-308
- Sasaki T, Karimi K, Hankins GR, Jane Jr. JA, Dayoub H, Corwin JT, Helm GA: Gene expression analysis of schwannomas using high density oligonucleotide microarray (Gene Chip). Proceedings for the 12th World Congress of Neurosurgery (2001)
- Li JZ, Sasaki T, Li HW, Helm GA, Hankins GR: Infection Efficiency of Recombinant Adenovirus in Brain Tumor Cells. Molecular Therapy 2001 May; 3(5):S115
- Sasaki T, Sasaki T, Okamoto K, Ishida T, Kirino T: Cavernous angioma of the internal acoustic meatus--case report. Neurol Med Chir (Tokyo) 1999 Nov; 39(12):847-851
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