Dr Keisuke (Kei) Kaji
This profile is from the MRC Annual Review 08/09: A day of discovery. The review takes readers on a journey through a day in the life of the MRC, dropping in on people involved in MRC research as they go about their daily business to find out what they’re doing.
Group leader of the biology of reprogramming group at the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine, University of Edinburgh.
Dr Kei Kaji is an MRC scientist researching how to reprogram adult cells to behave like stem cells.
Dr Kei Kaji is looking at bacterial colonies in his sunny Edinburgh laboratory. “At the moment I’m doing cloning, making some plasmid vectors. Just now I’m checking the bacterial colonies I set up last night to identify the clone I need to use,” he explains.
Kei did his PhD in fertilisation research in his native Japan. Six years ago he moved to Scotland, and has been working on stem cell research ever since. Kei is only 33, and looks even younger, yet despite being at an early stage of his career, he recently made a major research breakthrough. His work could pave the way for stem cells made from skin cells to be safely transplanted into humans for the first time.
Kei’s research focuses on reprogramming fibroblasts, a cell type found in many tissues, and trying to get them to behave like stem cells. Previous attempts to do this used viruses to deliver genes, but this caused cancer genes in the cell to be switched on and made the cells too dangerous to be transferred into humans. Kei’s idea was instead to put four genes onto a section of bacterial DNA called a plasmid. He used the plasmid to deliver the genes to the cell’s nucleus all at once and then take them out again after reprogramming the cells – and it worked.
A chance meeting between Kei and Professor Andras Nagy, a senior scientist in the field from the University of Toronto, made the two scientists realise they’d been using different approaches to work on the same problem. They agreed to pool their results and the following day, Professor Nagy was on a plane back to Canada, taking Kei’s plasmid with him. As an unknown young researcher in the field, was Kei worried that he might never hear from Professor Nagy again?
“He has 20 people working for him, whereas at the time I worked alone. Although I was a little afraid, there was no choice for me. He could make the same plasmid in three weeks since he now knew how it worked. So I gave him the plasmid because I knew that collaborating was a better situation,” he says. He needn’t have worried. Professor Nagy collaborated with Kei, even insisting that his name should not appear on the paper so that Kei could independently make a name for himself in the field. “Professor Nagy is a very generous man. Because I’m still young, it’s difficult to be recognised as an independent researcher. But he respected me and listened to my opinion from the beginning.”
Kei’s passion is for research and he spends most of his working day in the laboratory. Typically, he works until 7 or 8pm. “I don’t mind leaving late, I like to work independently. And in Japan, it was a lot harder. When I was doing my PhD I often worked until 12 or 1 in the morning. That was a normal part of work culture there,” he says.
“The motivation for basic researchers like me is the fun of doing the work – you don’t do this job if you’re after a big salary or a good holiday allowance. I do it for the sense of satisfaction.”
Published August 2009