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February 10, 2023

2023 CiRA Award Winner

The 10th CiRA Award Ceremony was held on Thursday, January 5. To prevent the spread of COVID-19, the ceremony was organized as a hybrid event, with a limited number of CiRA members, including principal investigators, attending from the CiRA auditorium in person while masked, and other CiRA members participated online.

This award was established in 2014 in accordance with Kyoto University regulations and funded by the iPS Cell Research Fund to recognize the outstanding achievements in education and research, administration and management of the institute, as well as social contributions and other activities by CiRA faculty members.

Professor Shin Kaneko (Dept. of Cell Growth and Differentiation) and Associate Professor Yasuhiro Takashima (Dept. of Life Science Frontiers) were recipients of the honor this year.

(From left)Shin Kaneko, Jun Takahashi and Yasuhiro Takashima
at the CiRA Award ceremony

Professor Kaneko has been conducting clinical trials on ovarian cancer treatment using iPSC-derived natural killer cells in collaboration with the National Cancer Center Hospital East. Immunotherapies using CAR-T or CAR-NK cells have proven to be an effective treatment strategy for some cancers in recent years. He is leading the way with advances in developing antigen-specific T-cell and NK-cell preparations using iPS cells. For these exceptional research achievements, he was honored with this award.

Associate Professor Takashima has been a driving force for a large-scale research project called "Creating innovative human embryology using stem cells," which aims to establish an innovative embryonic model to mimic early human development to gain a greater understanding of the many biological processes and the underlying molecular mechanisms essential to early development. This award was bestowed upon him for his remarkable contribution to this research area.

In the New Year's address, Director Jun Takahashi reaffirmed the importance of the three promises he made during his annual address last year: "respect and gratitude," "independence and autonomy," and "challenge and leaping forward." He also emphasized that "small improvements from each of us individually will make a great difference to CiRA as a whole" and stressed the need for CiRA to bolster its research output and continue to be a world leader in iPS cell research.

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