Gastroenterology and Hepatology
- Pathology of digestive disease
- Clinical research for new therapies
- Mechanism for cell death in digestive disease
- Mechanism of malignant neoplasms in digestive organs
- Immune response in digestive diseases
Evidence-based high quality basic and clinical research.
Medical care nowadays must be based on a solid scientific and clinical evidence. In our department, this is achieved through well-designed basic research and clinical studies to address good clinical questions and unmet medical needs. We have also organized multicenter study groups, named as the Osaka Liver Form, Osaka Pancreas Form and Osaka Gut Forum, in which Osaka University and dozens of partnering hospitals participate. These groups enable us to perform clinical studies that require a large number of cases or involve rare diseases. Through these approaches, we have established a number of new non-invasive methods of examination, efficacious treatments and surveillance approach.
In our clinics, regarding hepatobiliary and pancreatic diseases, we treat viral hepatitis, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, autoimmune liver disease, and autoimmune pancreatitis as well as liver and pancreatic neoplasms. As to gastrointestinal diseases, we focus on treating cancers and inflammatory bowel diseases. Simultaneously, we have performed a variety of physician-initiated observational and interventional studies for these diseases and are seeking new better treatments and efficacious biomarkers. The results of our studies have provided new clinical practice guidelines for diagnosis and treatment of digestive diseases. These works also lead to build a new scientific basis for how to approach these diseases.
Even though we benefit significantly from great advancement of medical field, most of the above diseases are still not fully curable and further therapeutic improvement are highly desired. We believe that this becomes possible through comprehensive understanding of fundament of disease pathogenesis. To this end, in our lab, we have performed basic research involving a diverse set of disciplines including immunology, molecular biology, genetics, statistics and so on. Through the high-quality and innovative research, we aim to understand the disease pathology at the molecular level and use this information to develop new biomarkers and therapeutics for an individual patient (Figure).
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