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Outline

Yoshinori Murakami
Principal Investigator
for Platform of Supporting Cohort Study and Biospecimen Analysis
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas ―
Platforms for Advanced Technologies and Research Resources
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan
The Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo


"Platforms for Advanced Technologies and Research Resources " was launched in 2016 fiscal year (FY) under the new framework of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas.

The project has succeeded and developed the previous program "Support Programs for Three Fields in Life Sciences (Cancer, Genome and Brain Sciences)" conducted between FY2010 and 2015.

Both programs were established by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) under the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas.

"Platforms for Advanced Technologies and Research Resources " aims to establish the academic research support platform to efficiently support various needs that the researchers in grants-in-aid to conduct their academic research.
Also it aims to work in close cooperation with the relevant core bodies such as inter-university research institutes and Joint Usage / Research Centers.

In such circumstances, "Platform of Supporting Cohort Study and Biospecimen Analysis" was selected as one of "Advanced Technology Foundation Support Program".

The program provides the cutting-edge and academically high valuable support including providing resources and analysis support: collecting, preserving, providing, and lecturing the preserving method of resources (reference data, experimental specimen, and samples).

Those supports are conducted at the core institution (the Institute of Medical Science, the University of Tokyo: IMSUT), collaborative institutions and facilities, and the relevant institutions with support in combination with highly specialized and advanced methods to provide the resources and analysis support.

Objectives of the Research Support

The objective of our platform is to construct the research infrastructure which creates to use efficient use of a wide range of research foundation in order to prevent diseases and provide medical care for the individual Japanese citizen according to its physical constitution. Accordingly, we systematically collect, classify, and store the cohort data of 135,000 general healthy Japanese individuals and their biospecimens including DNA etc.

Our platform is one of the largest bioresource groups in Japan which is prospective to produce the cutting-edge research results.

Also, we construct and promote the effective use of Japan Brain Resource Network for supporting research aiming to elucidate the mental illness and neuropathy based on the postmortem brains obtained by autopsy as an open resource.

Further, we conduct supersensitive and multilateral analysis on the biomolecular dynamics and biomarkers using various human biospecimens; those are in a large demand from researchers although they have many obstacles to introduce the system. We proceed the supports above by collecting and providing a wide variety of human biospecimen and its information, as well as by conducting the support by our original highly sensitive multimolecular analysis and integrative omics analysis to produce a research result to elucidate the life science phenomenon, and to support stepping up to the next phase.

Please click here to see our Research Support Plan in FY2018.

In closing, we encourage life science researchers to take advantage of the opportunity offered from our platform for generating their and their project groups' results in academic science as well as to publish the results to the world.

We sincerely hope that they will promote a dialogue with the general public about science and technology through their publication and enlightenment on the generated results and contents of their scientific work.

Also we would like to thank all visitors in general for the support and understanding about the research activities and the researchers. We hope the site content on the researches gives the readers the insights into Japan's current circumstances and achievements in life sciences.