Professor Tasuku Honjo is a renowned Japanese immunologist. He is a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and a Member of the Japan Academy. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study. He received the honor of Person of Cultural Merit of Japan in 2000 and the Order of Culture of Japan in 2013. For his outstanding contributions to the world’s medical sciences in the field of cancer immunotherapy, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with James P. Allison in October of 2018.
As early as in the 1980s, Professor Tasuku Honjo has established the basic conceptual framework of class switch recombination, where he presented a model explaining antibody gene rearrangement in class switch. In 1992, he first identified PD-1 as an inducible gene on activated T-lymphocytes. This discovery significantly contributed to the establishment of cancer immunotherapy principle by PD-a blockage, and it was listed by Science as the No.1 of the Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of the Year in 2013. In 2000, he went on further to discover Activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) and demonstrated its importance in class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.
Professor Tasuku Honjo was born in Kyoto, Japan. During his studies at the Faculty of Medicine, Kyoto University, he was under the supervision of renowned chemists, first Yasutomi Nishizuka and later Osamu Hayaishi. He received his Ph.D. degree in Medical Chemistry from Kyoto University in 1975. Over the years, Professor Tasuku Honjo was a faculty member of the University of Tokyo and the Osaka University School of Medicine, Head of the Research Department and the Faculty of Medicine, Kyoto University, and a visiting fellow of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the U.S. National Institute of Health. He served as the 10th President of the Japanese Society for Immunology and as a member of the Council for Science and Technology Policy of the Cabinet Office of the Government of Japan.
Professor Tasuku Honjo has been perfecting his scientific research continuously, which has earned him a great number of awards and honors. Apart from the Nobel Prize, he’s received other major medical awards and honors such as the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize in 2017, Fudan-Zhongzhi Science Award, Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates and Keio Medical Science Prize in 2016, William B. Coley Award and Tang Prize Biopharmaceutical Science Award in 2014, Robert Koch Prize in 2012, Imperial Prize of the Japan Academy in 1996, Takeda Medical Prize in 1988, Osaka Science Prize in 1984, the Japanese Biochemical Society Award in 1978, and others. Furthermore, he is deeply loved by the Japanese people, and was given honors such as the Kyoto Distinguished Honor, the Toyama Prefecture Distinguished Honor, the Yamaguchi Prefecture Citizen Honor, and the Shizuoka Prefecture Citizen Honor.