| "Quantum Bioscience and the Future of Healthcare" | |||
| <President's Lecture> | |||
| Chair: Takeshi Sagara (TAIHO PHARMACEUTICAL CO., LTD.) | |||
| ▼PL01-01 | Midori Kamimura (CBI research Institute) | 10/27 10:10-10:35 | |
| "Shaping the Future of Healthcare through Quantum Life Science" | |||
| <Plenary Lecture> | |||
| Chair: Midori Kamimura (CBI research Institute) | |||
| ▼PL01-02 | Kazuyuki Aihara (IRCN, UTIAS, The University of Tokyo) | 10/27 10:35-11:10 | |
| "Healthcare and Early Warning Signals from a Viewpoint of Complex Systems Mathematical Informatics" | |||
| ▼PL01-03 | Toru Miyazaki (The Institute for AIM Medicine) | 10/27 11:10-11:45 | |
| "A challenge toward creating a new medical paradigm by AIM" | |||
Science exists to advance a society in which people can enjoy healthy, fulfilling, and culturally enriched lives. Achieving this goal requires not only preserving health and extending healthy life expectancy through preventive medicine, but also developing effective therapeutics that accurately target the molecular mechanisms underlying disease.
In recent years, remarkable advances in artificial intelligence, exemplified by AlphaFold, have transformed our ability to predict biomolecular structures. While these developments represent a major milestone, they also remind us that structure prediction alone cannot fully address the complexity of biological systems. Within living cells, biomolecules rarely function as isolated entities. Rather, they form dynamic molecular assemblies whose structures continuously fluctuate in response to their biological environment. Understanding disease therefore requires capturing the disease-relevant structural states that emerge within these dynamic equilibria and elucidating the molecular mechanisms by which they give rise to pathological phenotypes.
Meeting this challenge will require a close integration of experimental structural biology and computational science. By combining complementary approaches, we can construct structurally and scientifically reliable models that more faithfully represent biomolecular behavior in vivo. Looking beyond atomic coordinates, future Structure-Based Drug Design (SBDD) will increasingly incorporate electronic structures and quantum chemical insights, opening new possibilities for rational drug discovery.
We are only at the beginning of this new era of SBDD. The direction is becoming increasingly clear, and the opportunities before us are both exciting and profound.
The CBI 2026 will provide a forum to explore how experimental and computational sciences can be integrated to advance drug discovery based on biologically relevant dynamic structural states. I sincerely hope that this meeting will stimulate inspiring discussions across disciplines and serve as a catalyst for the next generation of innovative drug discovery.
In this plenary lecture, I discuss healthcare and early warning signals of diseases from a viewpoint of complex systems mathematical informatics, introducing results obtained from a Moonshot Goal 2 project on “Comprehensive Mathematical Understanding of the Complex Control System between Organs and Challenge for Ultra-Early Precision Medicine” and a NEDO project “ Research and Development on New Generation Brain-Inspired Spiking Reservoir and its Implementation Technology.” First, I explain complex systems mathematical informatics as integrated methodology of mathematical modeling analysis and mathematical data analysis for complex systems. Then, I summarize our research plan to connect between healthy states and disease states seamlessly through predictive, preventive and Mibyo medicine toward ultra-early diagnosis and treatment of diseases on the basis of the complex systems mathematical informatics. Last, I look ahead its social implementation and future with new generation brain-inspired AI to be realized by artificial optical neural networks and other advanced hardware technology.
The circulating protein AIM (gene name cd5l), discovered by the author in 1999, has anti-inflammatory and tissue repair effects by promoting the recognition and removal of unwanted and foreign substances (called biological waste) of the body that trigger and maintain chronic inflammation. Furthermore, we found that AIM itself is taken up into the cell, significantly reducing intracellular oxidative stress inside cells through direct reduction and Nrf2 activation, revealing that AIM protects cells both from outside and inside cells. Based on such novel cell protective mechanism, we are currently leading the development of the world's first treatment for severe chronic kidney disease (CKD), and the animal drug has already completed clinical trials and is now under approval review. The functional activity of AIM is structurally regulated by binding and dissociation with IgM pentamers in the blood, using a single reactive cysteine residue and a charged area containing a calcium-binding site at the C-terminus. In cats where this regulation is congenitally impaired, most individuals develop CKD, with many dying of renal failure. On the other hand, IgM naturally forms a stable pentamer, but in certain mammalian lineage, the pentameric assembly appears instable and often fails, also resulting in unstable association between AIM and IgM, which provides high levels of IgM-free AIM in the blood. Hence, in these animals, although both AIM and IgM themselves are preserved normal structurally and functionally, a subtle structural mismatch with each other caused by only a few functionally unimportant amino acids impairs their original roles that depend on the form of the complex, sometimes leading to fatal diseases. Here, I would like to introduce AIM drug development towards creating a new medical paradigm, while discussing the importance of the completeness of the structure by multiple elements.