Professor, Division of Pathology, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine
Education and Career
M.D. (Tohoku University), 1989
Ph.D. (Tohoku University), 1993
Research fellow, Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Institute, USA, 1994
Research associate fellow of Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (JST), 1997
Associate Professor, Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, Tohoku University, 1997-present
Associate Professor, Department of Pathology, Ehime University School of Medicine, 2001
Research theme
Hypersensitive diseases associated with abnormality in immune system, i.e., allergic diseases and collagen vascular diseases, occur under particular and, in general, complex genetic and environmental conditions. As for this disease category, only a few cases are shown to be caused by an overt loss-of-function mutation on a gene with immune functions, i.e., complement genes (c4 and c5) and apoptosis gene (fas); however, most cases are associated with common genetic polymorphisms, which can be identified in healthy individuals. There is an increasing body of evidence that disease-susceptibility genes registered in a single disease entity are not decisive and have redundant roles in onsets of the other diseases. Here a new category of disease, namely, DISEASOME, can be defined in view of complex contributions of a particular genetic factor. By using animal disease models, we have been provided evidences of the inverse correlation between pathological immune phenotypes: autoimmune glomerulonephritis and IgE-dependent anaphylactic response, and the susceptibilities of EB virus infection and Fas-dependent autoimmune diseases. The aim of our project is to depict an unknown relationship of pathological immune phenotypes (diseases) by using animal models with genetically autoimmune-predisposition.