ASTRA 2025

Kako Suzuki

Young Investigators, The University of Tokyo

Kako Suzuki

Ph.D. student
Laboratory of Viral Oncology and Genomics
Department of Computational Biology and Medical Sciences
Graduate School of Frontier Sciences
The University of Tokyo

Biography:
Kako Suzuki is a Ph.D. student at the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, under the supervision of Dr. Makoto Yamagishi. Her doctoral research focuses on the genomic and transcriptomic characteristics of HTLV-1–infected cells and the development of adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma (ATL), with particular emphasis on identifying potential therapeutic targets. Through transcriptome analyses, they recently identified GARP as a novel tumor antigen in ATL, which promotes tumor cell proliferation and suppresses immune cell activity via TGF-β, and demonstrated the preclinical efficacy of anti-GARP antibodies (Leukemia, 2025). Currently, they are conducting comprehensive genomic analysis of asymptomatic HTLV-1 carriers to delineate the landscape of HTLV-1–induced genomic alterations and to improve the accuracy of ATL onset prediction.