In a surprise, Dr. Masayo Takahashi has announced that she has left RIKEN.
Takahashi indicates she will be new President of a company called Vision Care, Inc. as part of the Kobe Eye Center. I’ve pasted a picture of Takahashi’s Tweet with translation more toward the bottom of the post.
A big thanks to Piero Carninci, a biologist at RIKEN, for the heads up on this news. I’m sure they are very sad to see her go, but wish her the best!
Here is the beginning of Carninci’s thread with his first tweet on this below.
Masayo Takahashi, the pioneer of the iPS therapy, resigns from her RIKEN team leader position to move to a venture (Visiocare), in order to fully focus on human therapies.
What a loss for RIKEN.@masayomasayo @RIKEN_JP https://t.co/VvgI80FS4P— Piero Carninci (@carninci) August 1, 2019
Here is the link to the company.
Asahi has some coverage of the move here. Here’s another media piece as well.
Below are some quotes from Carninci’s translation of a PDF on the Vision Care company website about the news:
“She first resigned as project leader to focus on management of VisionCare. But she will remain visiting scientist at RIKEN; although she will continue to have a visiting position at RIKEN, she will focus on eye therapies. In RIKEN she has experience on transfer cells to patients.”
and
“To fully succeed in clinical trials, RIKEN is not an option and leaving for a new company, VisionCare, was the only option to go to clinical trials and fully impact the patients.”
and
“Helios is now a mesenchymal stem cell therapeutic companies (totally different vision after leading scientist, Masayo Takahashi, had to quit). Scientific level and direction made impossible to collaborate further for retina therapy. Clearly the VisionCare company is needed.”
Takahashi has done pioneering work on using IPS cells as a basis for treating macular degeneration. She has won numerous awards including Ogawa-Yamanaka Stem Cell Prize and right here The Niche’s Stem Cell Person of the Year Award. I see her as one of the top stem cell scientists in the world.
Hopefully this move will accelerate the clinical steps forward for her very exciting work.
Product development of IVD is much difficulty than research alone …….Making a Quality that treats is the most time consuming tasks
I congratulate Masayo for taking this bold step to make sure that her therapy is tested in the clinic. I understand perfectly, because I left Scripps Research Institute to start Aspen Neuroscience last year in order to bring our Parkinson’s disease therapy to the clinic. Research institutes like Riken and Scripps are not equipped to raise the funding for a clinical trial, and at this time, the best option is to obtain venture investment.