Opening Remark for the 42nd IMSUT Founding Commemorative Symposium
Opening Remark for the 42nd IMSUT Founding Commemorative Symposium
2015-06-02
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen!
It is a great pleasure and honor for me to start the 42nd IMSUT Founding Commemorative Symposium this afternoon. My name is Dr. Yoshinori Murakami, Dean of this institute, the Institute of Medical Science, the University of Tokyo (IMSUT).
First of all, on behalf of IMSUT, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to all five distinguished speakers for accepting our invitation to come to IMSUT and to give us their lectures. I would also like to thank all the audience, especially OB and OG scientists, for coming or coming back to IMSUT again and attending the meeting.
Taking this opportunity, I would like to briefly introduce the background of this institute and the symposium. As you may know, IMSUT was established by Prof. Dr. Shibasaburo Kitasato in 1892, 123 years ago, as the Institute of Infectious Diseases (IID). We then changed the name of the institute from IID to IMSUT, the Institute of Medical Science, in response to the greatly improved medical and public health conditions in Japan. Since then, in addition to infectious diseases, we started to integrate several new fields of medical science into IMSUT. These include cancer biology, human genome science, experimental medicine and systems biology, translational research and regenerative medicine. Now, IMSUT has three Basic Departments, six project-oriented Research Centers and an affiliated Research Hospital, which is the only research institute affiliated hospital in Japan. One of the six research centers in IMSUT is the Center for Regenerative Medicine, which is led by Prof. Dr. Hiromitsu Nakauchi at IMSUT. He is also a cross-appointed professor at Stanford University, California, USA.
In order to celebrate the founding of our institute, our long-standing history and our continuous acceptance of the challenge of pioneering into new fields of science, we hold an IMSUT founding commemorative symposium every year and this year marks the 42nd symposium. The Committee Members of the symposium have decided to focus on regenerative medicine this year, because as everybody knows, regenerative medicine is a popular subject in both basic and applied medical sciences, since Prof Dr. Shinya Yamanaka established iPS cells in 2006 and 2007 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012. Today, I am extremely happy to introduce to you five distinguished scientists in this field. Dr. Hideyuki Okano, Professor at Keio University School of Medicine, is going to talk about the regeneration of neurological and psychological disorders. Dr. Masayo Takahashi from RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology is going to introduce retinal regeneration and its clinical application. Dr. Teruo Okano, Professor at Tokyo Women's Medical University, is going to talk about cell sheets and its clinical application. In addition, Prof. Dr. Hiromitsu Nakauchi and Dr. Makoto Ohtsu of IMSUT will talk about organ regeneration and hematopoietic regeneration, respectively. I am confident that these lectures will strongly encourage the audience, especially young scientists here at IMSUT, and accelerate our spirit of challenge toward new frontiers in science. I myself am a cancer geneticist/biologist and so much interested in regenerative medicine. So, today, I am looking forward as a young scientist to listening to a series of exciting lectures presented by such eminent scientists.
Thank you very much again to today's five speakers and welcome to the IMSUT. Now we would like to commence the 42nd Founding Commemorative Symposium of IMSUT.