Kosuke Funato

The long-term research goal of the Funato lab is to develop new therapies and early detection methods for glioblastoma, one of the most lethal tumor types in both adults and children. Kosuke Funato began studying glioblastoma when he was a Ph.D. student at the University of Tokyo. He studied glioblastoma stem-like cells and identified potential therapeutic targets, including the histone deacetylase SIRT2 (Funato et al., EMBO Reports 2018). He received his Ph.D. in 2011, and, in the same year, joined the laboratory of Dr. Viviane Tabar at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. There, he started a project to study pediatric glioblastoma with recurrent mutations in the histone H3.3 variant. He has developed human embryonic stem cell (hESC)-based tumor models that recapitulate the genetic and molecular characteristics of patient tumors and reveal the crucial role of aberrant developmental programs in gliomagenesis (Funato et al., Science 2014; Funato et al., Cell Stem Cell 2021). Additionally, he studied an AAV-based antibody delivery method for the treatment of glioblastoma (Hicks, Funato et al., Cancer Gene Therapy 2014).