Yusuke Nakamura

President
National Institutes of Biomedical Innovation, Health and Nutrition
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Yusuke Nakamura was graduated from Osaka University School of Medicine in 1977 and spent five years as a postdoctoral fellow and a faculty member at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the University of Utah. In 1989, he became Head of Biochemistry Department at Cancer Institute, Tokyo. In 1994, he was appointed as Professor at Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo and became Director of Human Genome Center in 1995. He also served as director of the RIKEN Center for genomic medicine (2005-2010). In 2011, he was appointed as Special Advisor to the Japanese Cabinet. In 2012, he moved to Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago. In 2018, he returned to Japan as Director of Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program of Japanese Cabinet Office and then moved as a President, National Institutes of Biomedical Innovation, Health and Nutrition. For his accomplishment, he received many awards that include Medal with Purple Ribbon, Keio Medical Awards, Takeda Medical Award and Clarivate Citation Laureate.
 

Speech title & Synopsis

New Therapeutic Modalities for Treatment of Human Diseases

With advances in genomics and other various ‘omics’ technologies, it has become possible to continuously capture changes in immune cells in various pathological conditions and drug responses/adverse reactions. The immune responses activated through drug and HLA interaction have been shown to play key roles in drug-induced skin hypersensitivity and hepatotoxicity. In cancer treatment, it is becoming clear that the immune environment within cancer tissues and throughout the body is important not only for cancer immunotherapy but also for the responsiveness of other anticancer drugs and radiation therapy, resulting in development of new types of immunotherapies. However, the molecular mechanisms by which these new therapies kill tumor cells still remain unclear. Hence, we have been proposing the significance of the new filed to characterize the systemic and tumor immune environment including T cell and B cell repertoires by next-generation sequencers. In one patient who showed myocarditis after one-shot of anti-PD-1 antibody treatment, we identified infiltration of clonally expanded T cell populations in the skeletal muscle, implying the very strong T cell immune response against muscular cells. This kind of immunogenomics analysis is extremely important to uncover the changes in immune microenvironment during the cancer treatment and may improve the clinical outcome of immunotherapy including development of TCR-engineered T cell therapy. In addition, our institute has a large primate center, in which we keep ~2000 monkeys with a seven-generation family tree, and are doing long-read DNA sequencing. Some of these monkeys have several dominantly inherited disorders such as hypertrophic/dilated cardiomyopathy, macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, and severe obesity. Figuring out genes responsible for these diseases should provide valuable resources for drug development.