Department of Molecular Biology, Sapporo Medical University School
of Medicine

Epigenetic alterations including aberrant DNA methylation and histone modifications are hallmarks of human malignancies.
Our department is working on cancer epigenetics to understand the molecular mechanism of tumorigenesis and to apply our findings to develop new diagnosis and treatment strategy.

We have discovered a number of tumor-related genes and noncoding RNA genes which are epigenetically dysregulated in cancer.
We also provided evidences that they could be useful biomarkers as well as potential therapeutic targets.