I have been appointed as a professor in the Department of Immunology, Division of Immunology, Department of Pathology and Etiology, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, since May 2012. The Department of Immunology has been disseminating highly original new concepts, such as the research on inhibitory T cells by Dr. Tomio Tada and cytokines by Dr. Koreshao Taniguchi. I would like to pioneer a new era of immunology so that we can conduct education and research that will live up to the history and achievements of this traditional department. I became acutely aware of the importance of the immune system in the regulation of bone tissue during my research on bone destruction in rheumatoid arthritis, in which I specialized in orthopedic surgery, and was engaged in basic immunological research focusing on bone regulation by the immune system under Dr. Koreshao Taniguchi. In the process, I became fascinated by the idea of elucidating biological phenomena at the molecular level and clarifying their significance using molecular genetic methods and at the biological level. I have also focused on the interaction between the immune system and peripheral tissues such as bone and synovium, and have developed the field of osteoimmunology (see Profile). Bone is an important immune organ that contains hematopoietic stem cells, and the bone marrow contains many hematopoietic stem cells and lymphocytes, especially B cells, plasma cells, and memory lymphocytes. In the future, bone will be considered as one of the immune organs. In the future, we feel the need to elucidate immune regulatory mechanisms from a new perspective that considers bone as one of the immune organs, and we would like to further develop the concept of bone immunology that we have established so far to understand new immune response mechanisms.
In addition, from October 2009 to March 2015, I have been working on a research project as a research director of the ERATO Takayanagi Osteo Network Project, a strategic creative research promotion project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), which aims to elucidate the regulatory mechanisms of the whole body with a focus on bones. Please refer to this website for the research outline of this project.
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