Yukihide Tomari is a co-founder of and serves as a scientific advisor to City Therapeutics. He is a professor at the Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (IQB) at the University of Tokyo. His research is focused on dissecting the molecular mechanism and function of small non-coding RNAs and their protein partners by combining biochemistry, biophysics and cellular and developmental biology.

Dr. Tomari’s lab has demonstrated how the effector complex for RNAi is assembled with the aid of ATP-dependent molecular chaperones and how miRNAs silence protein synthesis from their target mRNAs. With his leadership, his lab has pioneered the use of cultured cells and in vitro biochemistry to study the biogenesis mechanism of piRNAs, which protect the germline genome from transposons. Recently, they have discovered HEat-Registrant Obscure (Hero) proteins, a family of entirely disordered proteins that act as a “buffer” to protect and stabilize other functional proteins including Argonaute, the core component of RNAi.

Dr. Tomari received a Ph.D. from The University of Tokyo in 2003. He then joined Phillip Zamore’s laboratory at University of Massachusetts Medical School as a postdoc, where he started working on small RNAs. In 2006, he was appointed assistant professor, PI at The University of Tokyo, advanced to associate professor in 2009 and was promoted to professor in 2013. In recognition of his scientific achievements, Dr. Tomari received the Japan Academy Medal and JSPS Prize in 2012, as well as the Inoue Prize for Science in 2017.