Medical Institute of Bioregulation, Kyushu University

The Medical Institute of Bioregulation, Kyushu University, has the aim of facilitating understanding of the essential regulatory mechanisms involved in human biology, at the cellular and molecular levels, with a long-term goal of curing diseases. At the Institute, we are interested in learning how individual cells regulate each other in the complex multi-cellular environment of the human body. The body is constantly exposed to a variety of threats such as infection, toxic substances, malfunctioning of organelles, and tumorigenesis. Yet, most of the time, homeostasis is maintained, and the body survives. How do our bodies, organs, and cells thwart threats and prevent disasters? We believe that the answers to this question will lead to cures for medical conditions including infection, cancer, allergies, autoimmune diseases, multi-factorial genetic disorders and degenerative diseases of the central nervous system.

The Medical Institute of Bioregulation was founded in April 1982, and underwent a major restructuring in April 2001, to better serve the above aims in this rapidly changing era. Three new departments and two research centers were established to replace the original departments. Since April 2010, the institute has been functioning as a Joint Usage / Research Center for the Multi-stratified Host Defense System, authorized by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. Our state-of-the-art facilities can provide our collaborators various services including high-throughput DNA sequencing, microarray data collection, electron microscopic analysis, NMR analysis, proteomic analysis, gene-manipulated animal generation and more. After several restructuring, the Institute now has three departments and three research centers. The departments are the Department of Molecular Genetics, the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and the Department of Immunology and Neuroscience (a total of eight divisions). The research centers are the Research Center for Trans-omics Medicine, the Multi-scale Research Center for Medical Science, and the Research Center for Prevention of Infectious Diseases (a total of fourteen divisions). The faculty of the Institute also contributes to the education of the Graduate School of Medical Sciences and the Graduate School of Systems Life Sciences of Kyushu University.

In 2012, the Medical Institute of Bioregulation celebrated its 30th Anniversary. In the 30 years of its history, the Institute has become one of the most active and productive research institutes in Japan and established its position as a world-known center for life science and medical science. Each division produces unique and novel findings every year and the faculty members and students publish many research papers in high-ranked journals such as Cell, Nature and Science. We also collaborate with other institutes and with the industry to further develop our findings and products for medical applications. One of the divisions has a clinical portion, which contributes energetically to translational research using products derived from the Institute. We sincerely hope that our research activity will eventually contribute to the understanding of the complex pathological processes and the development of therapies to cure intractable diseases.