Akitsu Hotta, PhD

Junior Associate Professor at CiRA, Kyoto University

Akitsu Hotta is a Junior Associate Professor at CiRA, Kyoto University. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2006 from Nagoya University, by studying transgenic chicken to produce human antibodies in their eggs by using retroviral vectors. As a Postdoctoral fellow, he joined Dr. James Ellis’ laboratory in the SickKids, Canada and developed the EOS pluripotency reporter to aid isolation of reprogrammed iPS cells. In 2010, he joined CiRA as an Assistant Professor and started his own laboratory. Since then, he demonstrated that CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing could be used to repair the mutation of Dystrophin gene, which is the root cause of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, in patient-derived iPS cells. Furthermore, he demonstrated that selective disruption of multiple HLA genes could enhance cellular immunocompatibility against killer T and NK cells. He continues to strive on development of novel genetic tools to realize iPS cell and gene therapies for intractable diseases.