• 2026.09.03 Our collaborative research on the development of a novel vaccine, led by Dr. Taishi Higashi of the Faculty of Pharmacy, Kumamoto University, and Dr. Motozono, was featured in the September 2026 issue of Kumamoto Keizai, a leading business and economic magazine in Kumamoto! If you are interested in this exciting research, we would love to have you join us! Let’s do research together!
• 2026.08.31 From August 27–29, 2026, Motozono-sensei, Aritsu-san (D4), and Nakama-san (D3) attended the 28th Summer Retrovirus Conference (SRC2026) held in Miyazaki, where they presented their research. We are delighted to announce that Motozono-sensei received the Best Presentation Award!
• 2026.08.27 Our D4 graduate student, Aritsu-san, successfully passed his doctoral degree examination and received approval for his degree, six months ahead of the standard completion schedule!
• 2026.08.24 Dr. Motozono has been invited to speak at the webinar “Unravelling T Cell Recognition: Insights from Immunology and AI,” hosted by Dr. Hashem Koohy from the University of Oxford. He will present our research on human T-cell antigen recognition, which we have been investigating using COVID-19 as a model of viral infection.
• 2026.07.31 On July 28, 2026, a major earthquake struck Kumamoto, Japan.
• 2026.07.21 Dr. Yoshihiko Goto (formerly a graduate student in our laboratory and currently a physician in the Department of Respiratory Medicine, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Kumamoto University) has been selected as the Runner-up for the Best Paper Award 2025 at the Kumamoto Campus of the Joint Research Center for Human Retrovirus Infection!
• 2026.07.01 We are delighted to welcome Dr. Ryuki Tokunaga, a first-year Ph.D. student and physician from the Department of Respiratory Medicine at Kumamoto University, to our laboratory.
• 2026.06.26 Dr. Keisuke Kamada from the Department of Respiratory Medicine at Hokkaido University visited Kumamoto to attend a scientific meeting. During his visit, Motozono-sensei met with Kamada-sensei and our graduate student, Tajima-san (Department of Respiratory Medicine, Kumamoto University), to discuss our research on immune responses in nontuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) disease.
• 2026.06.22 Our PhD student, Nakama (D3), spent three weeks (June 1–19) in Professor Takashi Aoi’s laboratory at Kobe University through the AMED HK2-MIRAI Three-University (Hiroshima University–Kobe University–Kumamoto University) Short-Term Laboratory Exchange Program, where he received hands-on training in experimental techniques.
• 2026.06.05 You Min stayed in our lab as an intern from June 1st to June 5th for a collaborative research experiment. We’re glad that we got good results.