Julio Leon Incio, PhD, MSc
Associate Researcher
Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases
School of Medicine

I work to understand why specific brain regions and glial populations — particularly astrocytes — break down selectively in Alzheimer's disease, brain aging, and schizophrenia, studying this directly in human postmortem brain tissue with spatial transcriptomics, single-nucleus RNA sequencing, and multi-omics. What defines my work is doing the whole arc of a project myself — from cell culture and in vivo models, through tissue processing, to the computational analysis that makes sense of the data. Few researchers can both generate and interpret multimodal datasets from human brain end to end, and I've built that range across progressively more competitive environments: from my training in Peru, to a MEXT-funded PhD at Kyushu University in Japan, to UCSF and RIKEN. I've earned independent funding at each step — the Alzheimer's Association AARG-D, the RIKEN Director's Grant, and a JSPS Kakenhi — and I continue to collaborate as a Visiting Scientist at RIKEN IMS. This work has produced 15+ peer-reviewed publications and 1,300+ citations. Current projects include spatially resolved astrocyte vulnerability in APOE4 aging, interlaminar astrocyte dysfunction in schizophrenia, microglial collapse in Nasu-Hakola disease, and multimodal spatial-metabolomic integration of the human brain.

• Comparative profiling of cortical gene expression in Alzheimer's disease patients and mouse models demonstrates a link between amyloidosis and neuroinflammation.
  Scientific reports 2017 Castillo E, Leon J, Mazzei G, Abolhassani N, Haruyama N, Saito T, Saido T, Hokama M, Iwaki T, Ohara T, Ninomiya T, Kiyohara Y, Sakumi K, LaFerla FM, Nakabeppu Y
• Peripheral Elevation of a Klotho Fragment Enhances Brain Function and Resilience in Young, Aging, and α-Synuclein Transgenic Mice.
  Cell reports 2017 Leon J, Moreno AJ, Garay BI, Chalkley RJ, Burlingame AL, Wang D, Dubal DB
• Human mitochondrial transcriptional factor A breaks the mitochondria-mediated vicious cycle in Alzheimer's disease.
  Scientific reports 2016 Oka S, Leon J, Sakumi K, Ide T, Kang D, LaFerla FM, Nakabeppu Y
• Molecular pathophysiology of impaired glucose metabolism, mitochondrial dysfunction, and oxidative DNA damage in Alzheimer's disease brain.
  Mechanisms of ageing and development 2016 Abolhassani N, Leon J, Sheng Z, Oka S, Hamasaki H, Iwaki T, Nakabeppu Y
• 8-Oxoguanine accumulation in mitochondrial DNA causes mitochondrial dysfunction and impairs neuritogenesis in cultured adult mouse cortical neurons under oxidative conditions.
  Scientific reports 2016 Leon J, Sakumi K, Castillo E, Sheng Z, Oka S, Nakabeppu Y
• MUTYH, an adenine DNA glycosylase, mediates p53 tumor suppression via PARP-dependent cell death.
  Oncogenesis 2014 Oka S, Leon J, Tsuchimoto D, Sakumi K, Nakabeppu Y
• Altered expression of diabetes-related genes in Alzheimer's disease brains: the Hisayama study.
  Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) 2013 Hokama M, Oka S, Leon J, Ninomiya T, Honda H, Sasaki K, Iwaki T, Ohara T, Sasaki T, LaFerla FM, Kiyohara Y, Nakabeppu Y