Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

Infectious diseases are responsible for substantial morbidity and mortality and continue to be of great concern in both developing and developed countries. Viruses are among the most common causes of infectious diseases. To ensure better control of viral infections, we need to conduct further study to understand infectious diseases and viral pathogenesis.

Following the recent appearance of a number of emerging diseases, many researchers have raised concerns about the urgent need to tackle them but have viewed this from a variety of perspectives. These include the need for reports of their clinical characteristics, for epidemiological analysis to identify risk factors, for theoretical study to estimate and predict transmission dynamics, for evolutionary investigation to find the origins of the emerging pathogens, and for in vitro and in vivo studies to identify the mechanisms of the viral life cycle and pathogenesis. However, each of these areas of study is independent, and there is a lack of organic linkage between them.

In my research, I would like to integrate clinical medicine, theoretical modeling, evolutionary biology, genetics, and molecular biology to gain a better understanding of viral diseases. Connecting various approaches to each other can deepen the analyses and, therefore, lead to innovative findings. The results obtained through one approach can be applied to another approach, and new findings can then be applied back to the original approach or to further different approaches. In this way, we could gain a more comprehensive understanding of viral diseases. These findings would make a contribution to place where the outbreak, or an epidemic/pandemic exists.