Informatics and biomedical sciences have advanced dramatically over the past decade. It has become possible to analyze, simulate, and predict various kinds of events using big data. Therefore, the results of AI-based analyses are expected to be increasingly used for healthcare.

On the other hand, with a rapidly aging society, increases in diseases such as cancer and dementia are threatening the quality of life of elderly people and increasing medical and nursing care expenses. This issue is a social problem for the entire world, in developed and developing counties. To solve this social problem, medical care should be provided not only for patients who have already developed a disease, but also for individuals who may be at risk for developing diseases to prevent them from developing a disease (individualized preventive medicine).

It is obviously important to advance research and development in order to understand pre-disease states and prevent disease onset through analysis of biomedical big data. There is an urgent need to develop a highly specialized and integrated field of informatics and biomedical sciences and to foster the development of leaders who can advance such a field.

The objective of this program is to integrate informatics and biomedical sciences, which have been rapidly advancing in recent years, in order to develop a new field of individualized preventive care to prevent individuals from developing diseases. This program will shift from conventional medicine, which treats existing diseases, and foster the development of researchers with the goal of solving social problems associated with a rapid aging society.

Masahisa Katsuno
Program Coordinator
Professor, Department of Neurology
Nagoya University Graduate School of Medicine