Current studies 1

Medical treatment in Japan is experiencing big, innovative changes in disease structure and aging populations. Upon creating new medical services, it is necessary to invent a brand-new “knowledge” by integrating medicine with cross-disciplinary and cutting-edge technology. Despite of its social importance, the developments of medicine for rare diseases (orphan drugs) and for incurable diseases (e.g. kidney diseases) haven’t made sufficient progress, since the area where pharmaceutical companies have been focusing on to develop new drugs is limited. Japanese basic research in Life Science is high in level. However, it has hardly been applied to the development and discovery of drugs these days, so there is concern about Japan’s weakening competitiveness and the shortage of human resources in the field of making drugs.

With the aim of “making drug (development of therapeutic medicine) from academia”, we suggest “treatment concept” based on the genes and proteins that we have discovered, doing basic research and performing verification by experiments on cells and animals. In addition, our laboratory is working hard on translational research in broader areas, including “Hit discovery”, “Lead optimization”, “Validation in animals”, “Non-clinical study” and “Early clinical trial (Phase 1, 2a)” conducted by doctors to testify the concept of treatment in human cases.

We operate effectively the process of “making drug from academia” which is cross-disciplinary research integrated with studies in different fields, and materializes an innovative “pipeline for research and development of drugs”.