Umezawa Akihiro

Akihiro Umezawa is General Director of National Center for Child Health and Development (NCCHD) Research Institute and develops human embryonic stem cell (ESC)-based therapy/regenerative medicine. He established ESCs for clinical studies and conducted a clinical trial with ESC-derived hepatocytes for pediatric patients in collaboration with the liver transplantation team. He also generated a series of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from genetic disorders such as DNA repair deficiency syndrome, Down syndrome, autism, Gorlin syndrome, and ataxia telangiectasia to correlate genotypes to phenotypes in humans. Previously he was Deputy Director of Center for Product Evaluation, Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA) and worked on the evaluation of biologics including cellular therapy products and the development of regulatory science. He published 400 peer-reviewed articles in the field of stem cell biology and medicine in correlation with disease phenotypes.

Dr. Umezawa graduated from Keio University School of Medicine in 1985 and obtained his Ph.D. in 1990. Following postdoctoral experience at the University of California San Diego and Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (formerly La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation), he joined the Department of Pathology, Keio University School of Medicine, Tokyo in 1995. He successfully held the positions of Assistant Professor (1995-1999) and Associate Professor (1999-2000) of the department. In 2002, Dr. Umezawa was appointed Head of the Department of Reproductive Biology at NCCHD, Tokyo. His research interest during the early period was the molecular mechanism of osteogenesis by mesenchymal stem cells, defining the biological property of somatic stem cells, and ex vivo prolongation of the human cell life span. Since then, he had expanded his expertise in the field of regenerative medicine in pediatrics.