Episode 16: Tasuku Kitada
Tasuku Kitada: Building a Biotech Strand by Strand
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Dr. Tasuku Kitada is the co-founder, President, Head of R&D, and a board director at Strand Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing programmable mRNA therapeutics for cancer, autoimmune disease, and in vivo cell engineering.
Tasuku received his B.S. in Biophysics and Biochemistry from the University of Tokyo, earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from UCLA, and completed postdoctoral training at MIT, where his work helped pioneer synthetic gene circuits built from mRNA. He later earned an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a senior biotechnology analyst at Candriam Investors Group before returning to science and company-building through Strand.
At Strand, Tasuku and his team are developing technologies such as self-replicating RNA, circular RNA, and logic-gated mRNA circuits to engineer the next generation of RNA medicines. Strand’s lead program, STX-001, is designed to express IL-12 locally in tumors and has already entered clinical testing in patients with advanced solid tumors.
Tasuku’s career sits at the intersection of molecular biology, synthetic biology, RNA therapeutics, and biotech entrepreneurship. His work has helped push the field beyond the idea of mRNA as a simple protein-expression vehicle and toward mRNA as a programmable therapeutic system — one that can sense cellular context, control expression, and potentially deliver potent medicines with greater precision.
This episode was produced and hosted by Tanner Baldwin
In this episode, we discuss:
Tasuku’s childhood between the United States and Japan, and how experiencing both cultures shaped his independence, discipline, and approach to science.
His decision to leave Japan for graduate school at UCLA and later pursue postdoctoral research at MIT, where he helped develop programmable mRNA gene circuits.
His unconventional transition from academic science into biotech investing, and what working as a public-market biotech analyst taught him about drug development, competition, and evaluating scientific ideas.
How the rise of the first generation of mRNA companies helped create the right moment to turn technology developed years earlier at MIT into Strand Therapeutics.
Strand’s programmable RNA platform, its clinical work using self-replicating RNA to express IL-12 in tumors, and the striking responses observed in some heavily pretreated cancer patients.
The next generation of Strand’s technology: systemically delivered RNA medicines that use molecular sensing to restrict therapeutic protein expression to specific tissues and cell states.
The potential to use in vivo RNA engineering to create CAR T-like cells directly inside patients, with the goal of making powerful immune-resetting approaches for autoimmune disease more scalable.
Tasuku’s lessons for young scientists and entrepreneurs: work hard enough to create opportunities, build a combination of experiences that makes you different, and don’t automatically talk yourself out of taking risks.