Message from Project Director

The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo, (IMSUT) established three collaboration sites in fiscal 2005 in China, two in Beijing and one in Harbin, and had been conducting China-Japan research collaboration, for two 5-year terms (fiscal 2005-2010; 2010-2015), supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology under the directorship of Professor Aikichi Iwamoto, former project director. IMSUT thus set up a new sustainable system that allowed IMSUT scientists to work in China, along with Chinese scientists, focusing on the studies of emerging and reemerging infections. In 2015 I succeeded Dr. A. Iwamoto as project director and launched the project China-Japan Research Collaboration on Defense against Emerging and Reemerging Infections, a new 5-year J-GRID program of Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED). IMSUT had founded two joint laboratories in collaboration with the Institute of Biophysics (IBP) and Institute of Microbiology (IM), which belong to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a large national institution consisting of more than 100 research institutes all over China. IMSUT has dispatched Dr. Zene Matsuda (project professor) and Dr. Takaomi Ishida (project associate professor to IBP and IM, respectively, as principal investigators (PIs). Along with their Japanese and Chinese staffs, these PIs are conducting basic and translational studies of HIV, Mers coronavirus, dengue virus, and norovirus. IMSUT is also conducting a collaborative research program on avian influenzavirus between Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka at IMSUT and Professor Hualan Chen at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The activities in Beijing and Harbin are supported by Project Professor Mitsue Hayashi of the Beijing Project Office. We aim to make the most of the situation, in which the collaboration is being done in the highly advanced institution in China and to aim to translate our basic studies into practical use in future. During the course of the collaboration we intend to train and educate young Chinese and Japanese scientists for the future generation and hope to contribute to the friendship between the two peoples. I humbly request everybody’s warm support.