Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Neurology

Achievements:
Masato Hasegawa, the Head of Department of Brain and Neurosciences, studies the molecular pathogenesis and progression of neurodegenerative diseases. He started working on Alzheimer’s disease at Yasuo Ihara’s lab in 1988 where he identified phosphorylation and ubiquitination sites in tau. In 1995, he joined Michel Goedert’s lab at MRC LMB where he and others demonstrated that alpha-synuclein is the major component of filamentous inclusions in Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. He next joined Takeshi Iwatsubo’s group in 1999 where he identified phosphorylation and ubiquitination of alpha-synuclein. In 2006, while at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Psychiatry, he collaborated with Tetsuaki Arai and found that phosphorylated TDP-43 accumulates in frontotemporal dementias and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. More recently, he has been studying the prion-like spread of neurodegenerative disease-associated proteins.