Hiroshi Kawamoto MD

Hiroshi Kawamoto is a professor at the Institute for Frontier Life and Medical Sciences, Kyoto University, working on the basic research that aims to clarify molecular mechanisms of lineage commitment in hematopoiesis/lymphopoiesis, as well as on the study for the development of immune cell therapy using T cells regenerated from ES/iPS cells.

Hiroshi graduated from the Faculty of Medicine, Kyoto University, in 1986, and worked as a physician in a hospital for three years. He took his doctorate course in the Hematology Department of Kyoto University in 1989 and then joined Prof. Yoshimoto Katsura’s laboratory at Chest Disease Institute (currently IFMS) from 1994 to 2001 as a visiting researcher, where he started to study early hematopoiesis and T-cell development. In 2001, he became an assistant professor of Prof. Nagahiro Minato’s laboratory in the Faculty of Medicine, at Kyoto University. He was then promoted to be a team leader of RIKEN Research Center for Allergy and Immunology, Yokohama, in 2002. In RIKEN, in parallel with the basic research, he has started the study on the development of cell therapy using T cells regenerated from pluripotent stem cells. He moved to Kyoto University as a professor of the Laboratory of Immunology at the Institute for Frontier Life and Medical Sciences, in 2012. In 2020, he got a cross-appointment position at Fujita Health University as a professor of the Laboratory of Regenerative Immunology at the International Center for Cell and Gene Therapy.

In 2019, he founded a bio-venture company “Rebirthel Co., Ltd.”, which aims to realize cell-based therapies against cancer or viral infection by using “universal killer T cells” produced from pluripotent stem cells. He sits on the board of Rebirthel.