The Research Fellow Awards were established five years ago to recognize the outstanding accomplishments of Memorial Sloan-Kettering's research fellows and research associates. There are currently about 400 postdoctoral fellows conducting research at the Center, and they come from all over the world. This year, one of the two recipients of the Research Fellow Awards was Katsutomo Okamura.
Dr. Okamura came to the Sloan-Kettering Institute as a research fellow in 2006, after spending a year as a research assistant at the University of Tokushima and two years as a research fellow at the National Institute of Genetics, both in his native Japan. He earned a BS at Hokkaido University, an MS at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, and a PhD at the University of Tokushima.
Dr. Okamura now works in the laboratory of Eric Lai, an assistant member in the Developmental Biology Program. They study the RNA interference (RNAi) and microRNA pathways, which are driven by short RNA molecules that, unlike most other RNA molecules, do not encode proteins. Instead these tiny RNAs pair up with and control the activity of messenger RNAs (which do encode proteins). There is currently great interest in using RNAi and microRNAs as experimental tools, and also in investigating their influence on disease and cancer. In addition, there is great promise in harnessing these processes toward powerful therapeutics.
"We're interested in the nuts and bolts of how this system works," Dr. Okamura said. "I would like to understand the mechanisms that make different kinds of small RNAs and regulate target genes." In only a year and a half since coming to Dr. Lai's lab, Dr. Okamura has made a string of fundamental discoveries about microRNAs and RNAi. He was first author on four papers published in top journals for biology, including Cell, Nature, and Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. His findings include the discovery of an alternate pathway that can make micro-RNAs, new activities of microRNAs, and the elucidation of endogenous (naturally occurring) RNAi pathways.
Dr. Okamura performs most of his research on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. "We could only make the kind of progress we did using this relatively simple experimental system," he said. "But almost all the principles we discovered in a fly turn out to apply to human cells. I hope our work will help researchers make the best use of small RNA pathways in their experiments, and perhaps such knowledge will eventually help in the treatment of disease."
"In a laboratory, one needs to have colleagues who can carry out all of the research ideas that arise," Dr. Lai said. "I'm very fortunate to have a great group at Sloan-Kettering Institute, and Katsutomo has been one of the key contributors to our work on small RNAs. He is very talented and brings many of his own ideas to his groundbreaking research. I'm very much looking forward to what the next year brings for his work."
