Message

Hiromichi KIMURA
Project Leader of COINS
KAWASAKI INSTITUTE OF INDUSTRIAL PROMOTION
Innovation Center of NanoMedicine(iCONM)

Project Professor, Institute for Future Initiatives, The University of Tokyo

Located in the Keihin manufacturing district, a praised area for industrial promotion, and facing Tokyo Haneda International Airport, a hub of Japan, a new healthcare industry has been established, whose first few steps have been attracting worldwide interest.
A diversity of human resources, funds and cutting-edge technologies has been brought together from around Japan and the world with the aim of “making the impossible possible”. Nanomachines, which are designed based on unconventional ideas, are created to serve as a “In-Body Hospitals”, and solve the problems of curing and preventing intractable diseases. Researchers from private companies, research institutes, and universities joined under one-roof and fully dedicated to this mission. From this, the management strategy team is constructing a globally recognized cutting-edge social system, and we are anxiously expecting the coming days, when start-up companies, products and services will be born in an incessantly flowing stream.

Kazunori KATAOKA
Director General and Research Leader of COINS
KAWASAKI INSTITUTE OF INDUSTRIAL PROMOTION
Innovation Center of NanoMedicine(iCONM)

Professor Emeritus, The University of Tokyo

A truly innovative element of this project is that it realizes an autonomous health society (smart life care society) by liberating anyone, anywhere and anytime from diseases of heavy social burden without any regards to psychological, physical or economic uncertainty. We aim to realize a “In-Body Hospitals”, which provides necessary diagnosis and treatment inside the required parts of the body at the precise time, by creating “smart nanomachines the size of a virus size, which autonomously patrol the microenvironments in the body”. This has been mere science fiction until now, but will be made a reality by self-organization of macromolecules integrated with functionals elements required for pin-point diagnosis and targeted therapy.

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Mission and vision of COINS

Our goal is to achieve a “smart life care society” where people will be free from the threat of diseases without any regards to cost and access to the solution, gaining better health in their daily life.

In order to achieve the vision of “Secure sustainability as a country advanced in its aging population and declining birth rate”, we employ the “backcasting approach” to develop future technologies that are both innovative and autonomous for realizing society where people enjoy healthy life. This will enable big goals and its achievement, which could not be realized by the conventional piling-up method.

What future technologies are there, which effectively suppress diseases of heavy social burden and allow people to live healthy by themselves?

COINS thinks that an answer is development of dream-like smart nanomachines that patrol around the body 24 hours a day, detect sign of a disease, treat the disease and immediately communicate the information to the outside body. Cutting-edge nanomedical research institutes have joined from all parts of Japan and the world to facilitate industry-academia-government collaboration toward development of nanomachines.

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Toward realization of "In-Body Hospitals"

COINS aims to realize “In-Body Hospitals”, which integrates all medical functions within the body. Smart nanomachines of a virus size will autonomously patrol the microenvironments in the body and provide diagnostic and therapeutic services 24 hours a day.