Mikihiko Naito

Project Professor

University of Tokyo

Short Biography

After granted Ph.D. degree from the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tokyo, Dr. Naito started his career at the Cancer Institute, Japanese Foundation in Cancer Research, as a postdoctoral fellow. Then, Dr. Naito was engaged in the Institute of Applied Microbiology, the University of Tokyo, as an assistant professor. In 2009, he became a head of the division of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the National Institute of Health Sciences in Japan and started the research on TPD technologies with SNIPER compounds. Since 2020, he has been a project professor of the Social Cooperation Program of Targeted Protein Degradation in the University of Tokyo. He has been studying many years the cellular responses of cancer cells to anti-cancer drugs, including druginduced cell death and emergence of drug resistance. His research on inhibitor of apoptosis proteins (IAPs) resulted in the development of IAP-based PROTACs, named SNIPERs, and he is regarded as one of the first inventor of the TPD technology. With his pioneering studies on TPDs, He received numerous honors including The Pharmaceutical Society of Japan Award. 

Presentation Topic: Current status and future outlook of TPD technology
• TPD technology is expanding to proximity-inducing medicines.
• Diversity of ubiquitin chains formed on target proteins by PROTACs and SNIPERs.
• Cancer specific TPD.