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Toshikazu USHIJIMA

Dr. Toshikazu USHIJIMAToshikazu USHIJIMA
President and Director
Institute for Advanced Life Sciences
Hoshi University, Japan
Dr. Toshikazu USHIJIMAToshikazu USHIJIMA
President and Director
Institute for Advanced Life Sciences
Hoshi University, Japan

Biosketch

Professor Toshikazu Ushijima graduated from Tokyo University Medical School in 1986, and started his research at the National Cancer Center Research Institute (NCCRI) in 1991. He became a section chief in 1994, chief of Carcinogenesis Division in 1999, and chief of Division of Epigenomics in 2011. He served as deputy director of the NCCRI from 2011 to 2014, and also as the deputy director of Japan Health Research Promotion Bureau from 2020 to 2022. Prof Ushijima demonstrated that aberrant DNA methylation is accumulated in gastric tissues of H. pylori infected people, that the degree of methylation is associated with risk of gastric cancer, and that H. pylori infection-triggered inflammation is critical for methylation induction. DNA methylation level is now being developed as a cancer risk marker in a prospective study with 1,800 participants. Besides the above series of work, he discovered that CIMP is a strong prognostic marker in neuroblastoma. He served as a Senior Editor for Cancer Research (2010- 2017), and is serving as an Associate Editor for Cancer Letters, Gastric Cancer, and Cancer Science.