The Sakamoto lab studies normal and aberrant blood cell development. Her research team is interested in the pathogenesis of acute and chronic leukemia, including acute myeloid leukemia and chronic myeloid leukemia. The overall goal of her research is to understand the signaling pathways that lead to leukemia or bone marrow failure. She is also interested in developing new drugs to treat these diseases. Her group experience works with mammalian cells and mouse models of cancer and bone marrow failure syndromes, such as Diamond Blackfan Anemia. There are opportunities to work with physicians, translational researchers, medicinal chemists, and advisors from drug companies with experience in drug development.
Experiments utilize leukemia cell lines, primary mouse and human hematopoietic cells, and mouse models will be used. Technologies in the lab include standard biochemical techniques (Western blot analysis, real-time PCR, immunoprecipitations), FACs/sorting, colony assays, lentiviral and retroviral transductions, transplantation experiments, xenograft models and bioluminescence, CyTOF, RNA-seq ,ChIP-seq, small molecule and shRNA/CRISPR library screening. Knowledge in bioinformatics would be helpful for single cell RNA-seq experiments. The intent of these early translational studies is to develop small molecules or peptides into drugs to treat acute leukemia. Assays to assess toxicity, metabolism, optimization, and mechanism of action of compounds are performed.
Dr. Sakamoto is committed to diversity and has trained many underrepresented high school, undergraduate, medical, graduate students and postdoctoral/MD fellows. She has served on the American Society of Hematology Minority Medical Student Program and was Chair of the Diversity Special Interest Group. She is currently working with SMASH Rising to recruit underrepresented high school graduates and community college students to Stanford to study clinical, translational, and basic hematology.