Unit Head
Hiroki Ando, Ph.D.
Dr. Ando is an expert in synthetic biology and has been working to develop the next generation phage therapy technology. After graduating from the doctoral course at Osaka University, he studied novel drug resistance mechanisms in Mycobacterium tuberculosis as a Senior Researcher in the National Center for Global Health and Medicine. He then studied phage engineering platform and synthetic phages as a Research Scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2017, he became an Assistant Professor of the Graduate School of Medicine at Gifu University. In March 2020, he joined Astellas as a Principal Investigator of Venture Unit - Engineered Phage Therapy. He has been in his present position since April 2024.
Publications
Mitsunaka S, Yamazaki K, Pramono AK, Ikeuchi M, Kitao T, Ohara N, Kubori T, Nagai H, Ando H
Synthetic engineering and biological containment of bacteriophages
PNAS 2022 Nov 21; 119(48):e2206739119. doi. 10.1073/pnas.2206739119
Ando H, Lemire S, Pires DP, Lu TK.
Engineering Modular Viral Scaffolds for Targeted Bacterial Population Editing.
Cell Syst. 2015 Sep 23;1(3):187-196. doi: 10.1016/j.cels.2015.08.013.
Press Releases
Partnering
Assets and capabilities that Astellas expects from its partners
- Information on pathogenic bacteria as new targets of drug discovery for the treatment of microbiome-related diseases
- Animal model for microbiome-related diseases
- Genome editing and modification technology in bacteriophage
- Unique library of bacteriophage applicable to phage therapy