System Medicine and Medical Care Hub Creating the Global Standard for Health and Longevity

As a trial project in the “COI STREAM Radical Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program” promoted by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Professor Oka and Professor Sakakibara of the Department of Biosciences & Informatics established a Yagami satellite base within KIF, and have started specific research activities for realizing a society with ideal health and longevity.
“The Faculty of Science and Technology is primarily engaged in two areas of research. The first is research to determine, for example, how to extract information from cells, and as part of that research, we’re trying to develop devices that will allow us to skillfully extract that information. The second area is the development of software to better support physicians when they’re examining patients because there are a limited number of physicians. These two themes are currently being advanced by members of the Faculty of Science and Technology within the KIF program in particular.”
As one of the specific themes, KIF researchers are using microfluidic devices in combination with optical measurement technology to build an environment for interactively fabricating new evaluation devices in order to evaluate the properties of cells differentially induced by human iPS cells.
“Right now we’re differentially inducing neuron cells from iPS cells, and this is being implemented together with every company. However, in this area, what we are very interested in is neurons that have a specific neurotransmitter called dopamine. For example, when neurons that have dopamine die one after the next in a specific region within our brains, the death of those neurons causes Parkinson’s disease. Therefore, one of our research objectives is to develop devices that can be used in medical care to extract large amounts of information by cultivating those neurons in a small device like you see here so that we can first accurately understand what properties the neuron has, and then determine what type of mechanism is involved for example in the development of Parkinson’s disease.”
The second theme is the development of basic informational technology to target innovative techniques for very early stage diagnoses and individualized medical care services by creating secondary data of comprehensive medical care and health information of individuals and effectively utilizing big data relating to medical care.
“First, we’re going to make it possible to obtain a significant amount of data that is found in our cells and in iPS cells. That is, we’re going to create an environment at Keio that will allow us to obtain various types of information from many tissues and cells. That type of information isn’t merely being gathered in a single location, but the biggest problem is enabling secondary use of that information. Therefore, if we can understand the cause of new diseases and resolve worrisome problems that may occur in the future from a health perspective, then we will probably be able to change the major makeup of Japan’s society ten and twenty years from now. We are engaged in research with those types of large expectations.”