PEOPLE

Biography

MD, PhD. In 2013 he created, for the first time in the world, a liver bud with vascular structure from human iPS cells and published it in Nature, establishing a methodology for building three-dimensional human organs and laying the foundation for today's global organoid research. He went on to generate liver, bile duct and pancreas successively from a single population of stem cells, and in October 2025 reported Phase I trial results in Med — taking the work from culture dish to patient in little more than a decade. He is a Professor at the University of Osaka, Institute of Science Tokyo and Cincinnati Children's.

In parallel, as a role of Founding Director of Communication Design Center at Yokohama City University, he treats medicine as a problem of communication and design: he coined the "Enabling Factor," which triggers joy and happiness in people, and proposes the "Enabling City" concept, which regards a whole city as an apparatus for health. For discovering that mammals can absorb oxygen through the intestine, he received the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology, and he was named to TIME100 Health in 2026.

Organizations he has helped found include Open Medical Lab, OrsoBio, Kanzo Biomedicines, Lunar Therapeutics, Stellar Science Foundation and Street Medical Labo. His fields are regenerative medicine, stem cell biology, transplant surgery and communication design.

Academic societies

Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine (Director), Molecular Biology Society of Japan (Director), Japan Society for Dementia Prevention (Director), Japanese Society for Organ Preservation and Biology (Councilor), Japan Society for Transplantation, Japanese Cancer Association, ISSCR (International Society for Stem Cell Research, Board Director 2016–2024), ASCI (American Society for Clinical Investigation, Member), AASLD (American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, Member)