Yokohama City University

On April 1, 2013, I was appointed as the new Chairperson of the Board of Trustees and CEO of Yokohama City University.
From 2006 to 2009, I was the Secretary General of this university, and during my tenure in 2008, a project to create innovation centers was adopted as a project of the national government. This project, toward which the university had started to make approaches as a major project, was successfully examined once again. This marks our sixth year working on this project, and we are extremely grateful for this.
In our mission statement, we state that our objectives are practical realization of technology that can efficiently detect abnormal posttranslational modification, commercialization of clarification research related to posttranslational modification and diseases, as well as practical realization of diagnosis markers. In the first five years, the large-scale and encompassing development of fundamental technology related to functional analysis of proteins has progressed dramatically, and steady results have been yielded in heading towards achievement of our mission statement. In addition, linkage with cooperating companies has gradually been taking shape, and we believe that progress is being made toward realizing the projects that each company is aiming for.
Starting this year, 3 companies will be newly participating as cooperating companies, and approaches will be made toward research on commercialization, centering on manufacturers such as those of chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and tests. This signifies that we are now in the stage where technology at our center is applied as business; results are moving towards the direction of further problem-solving, and this is something that I have large expectations for. In addition, by supporting international conferences, etc., I believe that we can move forward in the aspect of globalization of our center.

Our project is concerned in creation of a research center for clinical proteomics of post-translational modifications in our university. This project is supported by “Creation of innovation centers for advanced interdisciplinary research areas program” from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in Japan. In this project, a wide range of research works from “development of techniques to analyze protein post-translational modifications” to “development of therapeutic techniques and drug discovery” are conducted. We consider that collaboration with university and industries is important.At present, seven companies are involved in this project. We are making an effort to construct an innovation-directed research system for the university and industries to achieve an aid and also an effort to develop human resources. The Advanced Medical Research Center is a key organization in this project. A new research building for the Center is to be constructed in 2012. The translational research can be performed in this building in collaboration with industries. We aim to create a big research center, where we can investigate comprehensively the relation between abnormal protein post-translational modifications and diseases by infrastructure technology on a large scale. We expect various supports from everyone concerned in order to promote the development of this project.