Current President’s Message
Prof. Akira Tsuji, Ph.D.
Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology,
Kanazawa University
I am hereby sending greetings to all the members of this Society as I have assumed the Predident of this Society from January of 2004 because of the expiration of the Predident of Prof. Tetsuya Kamataki according to the rules of this Society.
Since its inception of the Japanese Society for the Study of Xenobiotics in 1985, this year will be the 19th year, and through the holdings of annual meeting, workshops, etc., we have made progresses as the forums of presenting research results, learning and enlightenment, of scientists who are interested in pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics. In response to the development and profound advances of the relevant life science, the research results presented in the annual meetings of this Society have always been at the cutting edge of the time and led the world in the pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics fields.
Now we are facing the great changes. Today when the human genome analysis has been completed, the FDA in the USA made public, in November of 2003, a draft proposing the importance of pharmacogenomics as indices for efficacy and safety of drugs with an aim of establishing personalized medicine, and has indicated an administrative guideline in that it may request a pharmaceutical company, etc. to provide data on the influences of gene polymorphisms such as drug metabolyzing enzymes, transporters, and receptors as biomarkers which may become the causes for inter-individual variability in developing a new drug. This draft has given great impacts not only to pharmaceutical companies in the world but also to those in Japan. With respect to the pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic changes which these gene polymorphisms exert, our members who had insights reported and communicated their research results to the world in the early years. We are proud of the fact that this Society has played advanced and pioneering roles in pharmacogenomics. To our regret, however, we are currently yet to obtain understandings of Japanese people in utilization of human samples and in some types of human trials required for carrying out and accelerating new drug development, and promotions of personalized medicine by use of biomarkers such as gene polymorphisms. We believe that the mission of this Society is to actively render assistance for obtaining this understanding from Japanese people and government.
I intend to further establish firmly in the direction to the globalization of this Society which our previous chairman, Prof. Kamataki, actively pursued. With the internationalization of our Society such as the start of the publication of our journal in English, Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics (DMPK), the my appointment to the Council of the ISSX from 2004, and the joint meeting in Hawaii with the ISSX in 2005 and the appointment of Prof. Sugiyama to the Predident of the ISSX in 2006 as opportunities, we are to carry out the further improvements of our website in English, the online submission and peer review in publication process of the DMPK, and the publication of all the abstracts in English of papers presented to our annual meetings from 2004.
Furthermore, I would like to strengthen the management of the secretariat for the membership services, and promotions of concrete activities of the management committee as an advisory organization to the chairman, and each of our committees, which our previous chairman, Prof. Kamataki, had pursued.
I would like to ask all the members to cooperate with us and understand our endeavors.
Akira Tsuji
Professor
Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kanazawa University