On 20th March 2026, Takuma Kobayashi (D3), Department of Chemical System Engineering, received Outstanding Presentation Award, The 25th Congress of the Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine.
Outstanding Presentation Award, The 25th Congress of the Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine
This award recognizes outstanding oral and poster presentations by primary presenter aged 45 or under.
Several presentations were selected from over 170 oral presentations.
About awarded research
The title of the presentation is “Establishment of a culture method for the maintenance and proliferation of renal stromal progenitor cells derived from mouse fetal kidneys and human iPS cells.”
The kidney develops from three types of progenitor cells: nephron progenitor cells (NPs), ureteric buds (UBs), and stromal progenitor cells (SPs). Among these, SPs play a crucial role in differentiating into various stromal cells while also regulating the maturation of NPs and UBs. However, many aspects of their biological characteristics remain unclear compared to those NPs and UBs, and methods for the long-term maintenance and proliferation of SPs in culture had not yet been established.
In this study, based on insights into the signaling pathways involved in kidney development and growth, we established a culture method that enables the proliferation of SPs derived from mouse embryos and SP-like cells derived from human iPS cells, achieving long-term culture exceeding 50 days.
This research enables the rapid acquisition of SPs in large quantities, and applications are expected in a wide range of fields, including the analysis of kidney development, the construction of disease models, tissue engineering, and drug discovery research.
Your impression & future plan
I would like to thank Professors Masaki Nishikawa and Yasuyuki Sakai, as well as everyone in the laboratory, for their support. I would also like to thank our collaborators, including the Renal Regenerative Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, for their dedicated efforts. Thanks to them, I was able to conduct this research and receive this prestigious award. I intend to build on this experience by continuing to devote myself to research in the corporate sector and strive to contribute to society.
Keisuke Kasahara (D3) , Department of Bioengineering, received Graduate Student Poster Competition Award at The 38th Annual Symposium of the Protein Society
Kazuya Takabatake (D3), Department of Nuclear Engineering and Management, received Poster Award at the 25th SCEJ Symposium on Fluidization ＆ Particle Processing
