Masao Hashimoto, MD, PhD is an Instructor of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and Emory Vaccine Center at Emory University of School of Medicine. He earned his MD degree in 2000 from University of Tokyo and completed residency training in Surgery. His PhD work focused on infectious complications in living donor liver transplantation, and he earned PhD degree in Surgical Science from University of Tokyo in 2008.
His first postdoctoral training was studying CD8 T cell responses against HIV at Center for AIDS Research, Kumamoto University. Subsequently, he joined Prof. Rafi Ahmed’s lab at Emory University and further studied CD8 T differentiation during viral infections and cancer. His current research efforts are directed towards understanding the mechanisms of T cell exhaustion during chronic infections and cancer and using this knowledge to develop new and more effective immunotherapeutic strategies for those diseases. His most recent work has shown that PD-1 combination therapy with IL-2 modifies CD8+ T cell exhaustion program, demonstrating that PD-1+TCF1+ stem-like CD8+ T cells—precursors of exhausted CD8+ T cells—are not fate-locked into the exhaustion program and their differentiation trajectory can be changed by IL-2 signals.