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Ken Kato

Dr. Ken Kato is a medical oncologist and the Chief of the Department of Head and Neck, Esophageal Medical Oncology, and Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Center Hospital, Japan. He is also the Chief of the Biobank Translational Research Support Section and the Clinical Research Coordinating Section of the Clinical Research Support Office. His primary research interest is chemotherapy and chemoradiotherapy for oesophageal, esophagogastric, and gastric cancer.

Dr. Kato is the Group Coordinator of the Japan Esophageal Oncology Group of JCOG, the most significant clinical trial group for cancer in Japan. This group have conducted clinical trials to develop new chemotherapy for metastatic disease and early oesophageal cancer in multimodality therapy.

As a study coordinator, Dr. Kato conducted the randomized phase III trial, which compared the surgery and chemoradiotherapy for clinical stage I oesophageal squamous carcinoma, named JCOG0502, which reported the non-inferiority of chemoradiotherapy to surgery. The randomized phase III trial of neoadjuvant therapy for resectable oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma, called JCOG1109, showed superior survival of triplet-chemotherapy over doublet-chemotherapy. This trial gave a new aspect to neoadjuvant therapy for esophageal cancer.

Dr. Kato has also been part of the steering committee of many international Phase III trials of oesophageal cancer, such as ATTRACTION-3, KEYNOTE-590, CheckMate-649, and RATIONALE-306.

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