8 persons from RWTH Aachen University including the Rector and 9 persons from Kyoto University, including the President Minato, Prof. Isa, the Dean of the Graduate School of Medicine, and several Professors of the Graduate School of Medicine and of Engineering, attended the ceremony. Opinions which include the contents of research were exchanged actively between the universities after the ceremony. As a result, it became clear that there were many interests in common and mutually complementary research fields between the universities, and so further exchanges will be expected in the future.
The title of Honorary Fellow has been awarded to Prof. Yanagita for her excellent achievements in the research field of kidneys. She has been clarifying the mechanism of the onset and the development of kidney disease from various aspects over many years. She has researched lately on the theme “Why kidney is not cured: clarification of the mechanism which prevents the kidney from being repaired” to clarify the mechanism from various aspects using methods such as lineage tracing experiments, the TRECK method, ATP imaging, and single-cell analysis. Recently, she has found in particular that “tertiary lymphoid tissues” formed in injured kidneys of patients with kidney disease prolong inflammation and that the tissues prevent the kidneys from being repaired, and identified the cells and signaling molecules which form the tissues. This knowledge is expected to contribute greatly to the development of medicine which promotes the repair of injured kidneys.
