Greetings. I have had the challenging task beginning in IVApril 2020 of following in the exceptional footsteps of the previous director, Dr. Tadashi Yamamoto, who suc-cessfully guided our center and its predecessor from 2015 through 2019. My tenure began at a difficult time for our institute and the world as COVID-19 was spreading ex-plosively in many countries and a state of emergency was about to be declared in Japan.Particularly for an institute that strives to international-ize Japanese research, the social distancing mandates and travel restrictions imposed for pandemic control have hindered our work. For example, more than a hundred for-eign researchers who had planned to work at RIKEN were unable to enter Japan. Social distancing also prevented the usual training for new employees. When the restrictions in Japan were at their greatest extent, wet lab experimental re-search stopped on all projects except those directly related to COVID-19. Dry-lab research (mainly informatics) could continue and wet-lab research has gradually resumed.The heart of RIKEN IMS is interdisciplinary research involving integration and collaboration among immu-nology, genomics, and transcriptomics. The laboratories conducting our research in these three fields are largely housed in separate buildings on our Yokohama campus. Integration of our research in immunology, genomics, and transcriptomics was already underway before my tenure as director began, but the pandemic restrictions have slowed our progress. For example, seminars lost the benefits of in-person interactions as they were forced to go online. On the other hand, we are actively promoting the regular IMS seminar and the online format now used for this and other symposiums makes it easier to invite speakers from over-seas.The pandemic has forced our international conferences and other collaborations to be cancelled, postponed or held online. An international summer school and symposium jointly hosted with Tsinghua University (China) has been postponed. Cancelled was the International Symposium on Immunology co-sponsored by IMS with the Japanese Soci-ety of Immunology. In 2020, we held an online symposium co-organized with Stanford University (US) that focused on development/differentiation and another co-organized with Karolinska Institute/SciLifeLab (Sweden) that focused on artificial intelligence.Among the many excellent papers published by IMS sci-entists in 2020 was one by Dr. Ohno’s team on the relation-ship between gut bacteria and immunity in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis. They found that one gut bacterium that induces Th17 cells (related to inflammation) and an-other that induces proliferation of antigen-specific T cells may work synergistically to activate antigen-specific T cells in the central nervous system. With research in humans, this major insight may facilitate development of preventa-tive or therapeutic treatments of multiple sclerosis or other autoimmune diseases.To address the pandemic crisis, we are implement-ing more than 10 COVID-19-related extensions of exist-ing research projects, including Dr. Fujii’s project that is described later in this annual report. In addition, we are improving our biosafety level 3 facilities not only to handle SARS-CoV-2, but also to be used for research on future in-fectious diseases, such as new influenza strains.As vaccination against COVID-19 ramps up and the pandemic hopefully subsides, the future of RIKEN IMS is difficult, but we are working hard to succeed. Innovative results are anticipated from the increases we are facilitating in the crosstalk between experimental wet lab research and dry lab informatics research. Another promising initiative is the use of more human-derived samples in immunol-ogy research to supplement the IMS’s world-class expertise with animal models; the in-house development of new methodological approaches is expected to accelerate this work. We hope that our improvements to the RIKEN IMS research environment will encourage even more of the best young researchers from around the world to gather here and innovate with us.Kazuhiko YamamotoDirectorRIKEN Center for Integrative Medical SciencesDirector’s Report
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