Healthcare and Science thomsonreuters.com

I'm a physician — a medical oncologist — and my mission is to bring our clinical scientific knowledge up to speed with the West.

In Japan we have many experiences of drug disasters, and these disasters are mainly due to having a weak position on science.  We have a lot of problems in drug discovery as well as the regulatory process of approval and dispensing.

Recently, for example, more than 700 patients died from using an molecular targeting drug developed by a big pharmaceutical company in the UK. This was not used by US and EU and there was no evidence of effectiveness, in fact most trials had failed. The response to the drug was good, but survival benefit is not evident. The reason doctors prescribed it was because they have a poor scientific basis.

That is why I am doing this job. In Japan our basic research in life sciences is widely published and highly regarded internationally. The Translational Research Informatics Center aims to take our academic research and expertise and translate it into clinical practice for the benefit of practitioners and ultimately patients.

In 2000 I was invited to become a professor at Kyoto University and built the first pharmacoepidemiology department in our country. Now, as director of the Translational Research Informatics Center (TRI) of the Foundation for Biomedical Research and Innovation (FBRI) in Kobe, I supervise the six universities who are joined in alliance with this institute and together we look at all areas of medical treatment and devices.

Another serious concern for us is the protection of intellectual property. My biggest concern for Japan is that because all the major life science journals are in the US and Europe, our research is published outside the country. The moment it is sent to a publication, it is everywhere that same day and we have lost all control.

I have many experiences of this - for example one scientist was published in Nature. The citation was very big and of course he is proud of this. So, when I check for the patent about the substances used and the potential application, I find he has not opened one and yet already there are over 20 patents filed around the world. That is why my constant message to researchers is patent, patent, patent!

So there are two equal sides of the coin: without the patent strategy we can have no effective research strategy.