Katsuhiro Ito, MD, PhD

Katsuhiro Ito, M.D., Ph.D, is a urologic surgeon-scientist with a research focus on cancer immunology and immunotherapy. He received his M.D. from Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine, Japan, and completed his clinical training and board certification in urology through multiple academic and tertiary care hospitals in Japan. He has extensive experience as a practicing urologist, with a clinical background spanning urothelial carcinoma, renal cell carcinoma, and minimally invasive urologic surgery.

Driven by the unmet clinical need in advanced cancer treatment, Dr. Ito transitioned to translational and immunogenomic research. He received his Ph.D. at Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, where his research focuses on identifying biomarkers and therapeutic targets for immune checkpoint blockade by integrating clinical outcomes with genomic and transcriptomic data. His doctoral work includes large-scale analyses of molecular subtypes of clear cell renal cell carcinoma and studies of circulating tumor-reactive T cells in non-small cell lung cancer.

Dr. Ito has led projects that revealed subtype-specific immune microenvironments and resistance mechanisms to immunotherapy, as well as the identification and validation of novel circulating T cell biomarkers using single-cell RNA sequencing and flow cytometry. His research expertise spans immunogenomics, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, and functional immunology, including antigen-specific T cell assays, TCR-engineered T cells, patient-derived organoids, and in vivo mouse models.

Since 2025, Dr. Ito has been a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Cancer Center, Yale School of Medicine. In the Braun Lab, he applies integrative computational and experimental approaches to elucidate mechanisms of immunotherapy efficacy and resistance, with the goal of advancing biomarker-driven and personalized immunotherapy for renal cell carcinoma.