ASTRA 2025

Shota Sasagawa

Young Investigators, RIKEN Center

Shota Sasagawa is a Research Scientist at RIKEN (Yokohama) since 2018, integrating genomics and immunology to advance precision oncology for cancer and hereditary diseases. He leads R/Python-based statistical and machine-learning workflows across bulk NGS, single-cell, and spatial transcriptomics, building reproducible pipelines and linking clinical metadata for rigorous QC, benchmarking, and translational interpretation. His first-author work in Cell Reports Medicine (2022) showed that immuno-genomic profiling of pretreatment biopsies predicts neoadjuvant chemotherapy response in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, underscoring the clinical value of integrated tumor–immune features. As a co-author, he helped identify an eosinophilic signature associated with favorable prognosis in female, non-smoking ESCC (Cancer Letters, 2024) and characterized germline variants and homologous recombination deficiency in biliary tract cancers (Journal of Hepatology, 2023).

He also contributed to a proteogenomic atlas of virus-associated liver cancers that proposed candidate subtypes and therapeutic targets (Nature Communications, 2022), and to work implicating prevalent somatic mutations activating PDGFRB/NF-κB signaling in intracranial aneurysms (Science Translational Medicine, 2023). Collectively, his research advances biomarker discovery and treatment-response prediction through integrative, clinically anchored analysis.