Keynote speakers

Masatoshi Hagiwara graduated from Mie University School of Medicine in 1984 and obtained his PhD in the Department of Pharmacology in 1988 by discovering the inhibitory mechanism of isoquinolinesulfonamide compounds on protein kinases. One of them, fasudil, was developed as a clinical drug to prevent vasoconstriction after subarachnoid haemorrhage. At the Salk Institute, he found that transcriptional attenuation follows PP-1-mediated dephosphorylation of CREB and succeeded in identifying CBP as the phosphorylated CREB binding protein. When he returned to Japan in 1993, he started his own laboratory at Nagoya University School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor. He moved to Tokyo in 1997 as a Professor at the Medical Research Institute of Tokyo Medical and Dental University, and decided to try to decipher the splicing code to cure genetic diseases. He moved from Tokyo to Kyoto University in 2010 as a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, Graduate School of Medicine.

Guanhua Du is a tenured professor of Pharmacology at Peking Union Medical College; Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences; Former-President of the Chinese Pharmacological Society; Councillor of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (IUPHAR), Councillor of the Executive Committee of the Asia Pacific Federation of Pharmacologists (APFP); and Director of the National Centre for Pharmaceutical Screening. Dr Du obtained his PhD degree from Peking Union Medical College in 1995, and conducted his postdoctoral research at the University of Liège, Belgium from 1995 to 1998. Dr Du is primarily engaged in drug discovery and development, screening methods and strategy, and research on drug effects and mechanisms in cerebrovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. He originated the national high-throughput drug screening system in China, and provided drug screening services for over 300 million samples for domestic pharmaceutical institutions or enterprises. In the past 10 years, Dr Du has published more than 500 papers and more than 30 monographs, and applied for more than 90 patents. He has completed preclinical research on 9 new drugs, among which 3 have been brought to market, and 6 have entered clinical trials. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Pharmacology Research: Modern Chinese Medicine, Associate Editor of Pharmacology & Therapeutics and more than ten other scientific journals.