At St. Jude, Dr. Hiroto Inaba leans on his samurai roots to “fight” for the best outcomes for his patients

Dr. Hiroto Inaba was raised in a rural province in Japan to honor his samurai heritage, to live a life of service and purpose. His parents taught him that a noble life as defined by the samurai, a warrior class in feudal Japan between the 12th and 19th century, is one that upholds “the good fight,” Inaba says. 

He began practicing medicine as a general pediatrician, but after he lost his mother to cancer, Inaba decided his “good fight” would be as an oncologist against childhood cancer.

When he first began treating patients with cancer in Japan, he quickly realized that while survival rates for cancer patients in the 1990s were improving, they were not as high as he wanted. In search of better outcomes for patients, Inaba found research published by doctors at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital®.

“And I just noticed St. Jude is shining actually… I felt it was the best pediatric hematology/oncology hospital in the world,” Inaba said of his first impression of the research hospital in Memphis, “so that’s why I wanted to come here.”

Two decades later, Inaba continues his “good fight” by improving the care and treatment for children with leukemia and lymphoma. 

“The good fight is to protect and to bring the best outcome for our patients and families,” said Inaba.  In addition to providing care to patients as a member of the department of Oncology at St. Jude, Inaba is now the director of the Pediatric Hematology Oncology Fellowship Program at St. Jude, mentoring the next generation of doctors caring for kids with cancer and hematologic disorders. 

Inaba said he draws on his samurai ancestry for his work at St. Jude, leaning on the samurai code of values, “Bushido,” that extolls virtues such as respect, honesty, loyalty, courage, and benevolence to guide his interactions with patients and families. Those values also help strengthen his collaborations with colleagues on the St. Jude campus and across the U.S. and the world.

“Many philosophies coming from my ancestors and ‘Bushido’ help my work here. I just keep my culture and that is very helpful actually. St. Jude allows me to express myself that way,” said Inaba, who is 17th generation samurai.

Thanks to the research conducted in the labs at St. Jude, combined with clinical trials with patients led by doctors like Inaba and his colleagues, survival rates have improved for some of the most common types of childhood cancers: ALL and acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

In ALL, survival rates are at 94%, compared to roughly 84% when he first came to St. Jude in 2003. In AML, which Inaba says is a harder-to-treat disease, he has seen survival improve from 50 percent to 70 percent over the last 20 years. Inaba said the work St. Jude is doing to identify genetic mutations and understand what variations in the DNA cause pediatric cancers to start, grow, become resistant to treatment and even return have helped him develop tailored therapies that attack specific abnormalities found in cancer cells. That has allowed treatments to be more effective with fewer side effects, Inaba said. Eventually, he said, he hopes doctors are able to create individualized therapy for each child with AML as well as those with ALL.

He calls the progress he’s seen “amazing,” even as he admits work remains until St. Jude is able to carry out its founder Danny Thomas’s promise that “no child should die in the dawn of life.”

“Patients and families make me always motivated because they come here for help. They come here for hope,” Inaba said. “That motivates me.”