Satoshi Ikeo

It was my honour to receive the APSR / JRS Young Investigator Award at the APSR 2021 Congress in Kyoto. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the APSR and Japanese Respiratory Society (JRS) for this opportunity. I am a physician at the Department of Respiratory Medicine, Kyoto University.

In this Congress, I gave the presentation entitled “Transplantation of lung progenitors derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells into the murine lungs”. This research was done when I was a graduate student. In our previous reports, lung progenitors and respiratory epithelial cells could be induced from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), such as human induced pluripotent stem cells. In this research, we succeeded in engrafting hPSC-derived lung progenitors (hLPs) into the murine lung for eight weeks and demonstrated that hLPs were differentiated in vivo into respiratory epithelial cells, such as alveolar epithelial cells and club cells, confirmed by immunofluorescence staining and transcriptome analysis. This work is the first step toward lung regenerative medicine for the treatment of refractory lung diseases with no therapeutic alternatives.

APSR 2021 was held as a hybrid congress in Kyoto on 20-21 November 2021. I participated physically since I lived in Kyoto, but I understood it was difficult for most participants to visit Japan because of COVID-19. I hope that the COVID-19 pandemic will be under control and that all participants will attend the APSR Congress 2022 in Seoul next year.

Finally, I would like to send my deepest gratitude to my professor and mentors for their support.

Thank you again and best regards.

Satoshi Ikeo