Research

Outline of Research

Our four research groups fully cover whole basic and clinical fields of Internal Medicine. We have enthusiastically developed our research by collaboration not only with each other but also with other departments, schools or institutes. Our researches are fruitful, and we publish over 30 or 40 original English papers every year.

Research groups

1) Diabetes, Metabolism and Endocrinology
2) Gastroenterology
3) Nephrology, Hypertension and Collagen diseases
4) Cardiology

Main research projects

1) Molecular pathology in obesity and diabetes
2) Clinical research for diabetes and its complications
3) Fatty liver-associated metabolic syndrome
4) Gene and protein expression profiling of liver and digestive diseases and functional analysis of differentially expressed genes
5) Molecular basis of interferon treatment of chronic hepatitis C and prevention of hepatocellular carcimoma
6) Molecular prevention of hepatocellular carcinoma development in the transgenic mouse model
7) Development of immuno-, chemo- and gene therapy for gastrointestinal cancers
8) Pathogenesis and therapeutic approaches of chronic kidney disease
9) Regeneration from injured kidney
10) Pathogenesis and therapeutic approaches of diabetic nephropathy
11) Autonomic nervous activity and cardiovascular disease and hypertension
12) Catheter ablation for complicated arrhythmias
13) Excimar-laser coronary ablation for complicated ischemic hear disease
14) Systemic responses to myocardial ischemia/ischemia-reperfusion injury
15) Development of cell therapy for organ failure disorders

The liver metabolizes a wide variety of nutrients and releases the metabolites in systemic blood stream. Thus, the liver is closely related with metabolic diseases such as diabetes and hyperlipidemia. We can not recognize the disease unless patients have symptoms, abnormal physical findings, elevation of liver enzymes, or morphological changes. Using advanced technologies of genomics, we can now recognize the disease even if the patients do not show such abnormalities. We constructed the biggest gene expression libraries of the liver in the world using serial gene expression analysis (SAGE), and DNA chips harboring 10,000 genes for the analysis of the liver diseases. The expression libraries include various liver diseases such as viral hepatitis, autoimmune hepatitis, primary biliary cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. We firstly reported that liver expressed genes of diabetic patients are different from those of non-diabetic patients, and the altered genes possibly responsible for systemic vascular complications. We are extending to examine the altered genes in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) other than the liver in a variety of systemic diseases, and trying to identify the patho-physiological interaction of liver and systemic diseases. Thus, we rebuilt the importance of the liver in recent satiation period using genomic technologies.