DepartmentsPage back
Molecular Transport分子輸送学講座
Staffs
- Professor (concurrent): Katsuya Yamada
- Associate Professor (visiting): Hideki Iijima
- Assistant professor: Yota Tatara, Shuya Kasai
Research Projects
Curing cancer remains a significant challenge. There is no curative treatment for patients with intractable cancers such as in pancreas, bile duct, or brain, and with distant metastases. Our major research projects are to realize both earlier detection of these cancers and a highly cancer cell-specific treatment, contributing ultimately to prolonging the patients' and potential patients' life expectancy based on our patents-granted findings with fluorescent dye-tagged L-glucose*1. Collaborating with over 25 leading laboratories and companies in Japan and foreign countries, we have a hope to develop patient-friendly, highly cancer-specific treatments against individual cancer staging including stage 0 by the novel approach. Research on L-glucose is among rare examples where Japan is leading the way in the development of the field. Researchers not only in medicine but from various fields gathered and discussed in the first meeting on L-glucose held in April last year in Hirosaki University (the organizer: Yamada) and in the second held in April this year in Osaka Metropolitan University (the organizer: Professor Takeaki Ishizawa, Hepato-Biliary-Pancreatic Surgery).
Further Details
*1) Mammalian including human cells take D-glucose as a major fuel. Cancer cells also consume abundant D-glucose, producing a widely used cancer detection method with positron emission tomography (PET). However, PET is not effective at detecting cancers smaller than about 5 mm. To visualize D-glucose uptake into single cancer cells, fluorescent dye-tagged D-glucose 2-NBDG (Yamada, K. et al. Nature Protocols 2007) is utilized as the most popular method (6560 hits in Google Scholar. June 19, 2025). Unfortunately, accurate identification of small malignant tumor (= cancer) with D-glucose is difficult, since D-glucose is taken not only into cancer, but also inflammation, benign tumor, and normal cells as brain. L-glucose, the mirror image of D-glucose, has not been paid attention, since it is an unusable sugar for living beings (Rudney, H. Science 1940). In 2010, however, we developed 2-NBDLG, the first ever fluorescent dye-tagged L-glucose, and discovered its selective uptake into pancreatic tumor cells that exhibited malignant features, later producing over 40 patents. It has been gradually proven that this unique property is originated from a nature of L-glucose itself, and applicable to a wide variety of cancer types. Furthermore, we are developing a novel theragnostic method with minimal side effects to normal cells; applying anti-cancer agents that conjugate L-glucose as a drug delivery system to cancer cells being detected by the L-glucose probe. For more details, see https://www.med.hirosaki-u.ac.jp/~transport/jp/index.html