Kazuhiro Sakurada

My motivation of the research is to understand the nature and the fundamental principle of the life system of human being. Adaptation can be the central core of the nature of the life system. Life can be described as a locus of change in circulative interactions of nodes. Adaptation indicates the process of life system to store the information derived from the environment by converting the internal architecture generated by the interaction of nodes which control the outputs initiated by the environmental inputs in the future. Within the time window of the life span of the human individual, epigenetic takes the central role for the storage of environmental inputs. The change of the internal architecture driven by the epigenetic change from moment to moment is the principle of the one-time-only nature of body and brain. These epigenetic changes reside in tissue stem cells and neurons. My mission of research is to identify the architectures in tissue stem cells and neurons which are fragile from the environmental inputs by using systems biology and experimental biology. The knowledge obtained in this research would be applied in the generation of the novel therapeutic concepts for intractable diseases and the new value creation of human being.

Sakurada K, McDonald FM, Shimada F. (2008) Regenerative medicine and stem cell based drug discovery. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 47(31):5718-5738.

Masaki H, Ishikawa T, Takahashi S, Okumura M, Sakai N, Haga M, Kominami K, Migita H, McDonald F, Shimada F, Sakurada K. (2008) Heterogeneity of pluripotent marker gene expression　in colonies generated in human iPS cell　induction culture. Stem Cell Res. 1 (2): 105-115