Projects

IMS collaborates with DMP to develop innovative new phar-maceuticals and medical technologies by facilitating the trans-fer of basic research within the institute. DMP was founded in RIKEN in 2010 in order to support all phases of development of new therapeutics, from the discovery of promising targets to the identification of potential lead compounds, such as small mol-ecules and antibodies, and the acquisition of intellectual property rights to drugs and technologies that can then be brought to the development phase.To achieve effective progress in this area, DMP established nine Drug Discovery Basic Units, in which the types of studies being performed are organized according to the expertise of each PI. IMS contributes to this effort in several ways, including by set-ting up a facility for the development of antibody drugs, the Drug Discovery Antibody Platform Unit. In 2020, IMS now has six collaborative programs with DMP: Artificial adjuvant vector cells (Shin-ichiro Fujii), Cancer therapy with iPS-derived NKT cells (Haruhiko Koseki), Drugs for allergic diseases (Masato Kubo), neutralizing mAb for HBV infection (Daiki Miki) and therapeutic mAb for inflammatory bowel diseases (Takashi Saito). An investi-gator-initiated Phase I clinical trial of the Artificial adjuvant vec-tor cell project for cancer therapy has just been completed.

Figure: Collaboration between IMS and DMP for the development of innovative new pharmaceuticals and medical technologies