About

What’s PRIMe?

Osaka University’s Premium Research Institute for Human Metaverse Medicine (PRIMe) has a great objective: to establish a ground-breaking scientific field “Human Metaverse Medicine”. This field comprehensively and continuously elucidates the process of disease development. Our goal is to develop personalized prevention methods and curative treatments for diseases.

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About

Message from the Director

Kohji Nishida Professor, Graduate School of Medicine Osaka University

We are creating a new scientific field “Human Metaverse Medicine” that will help to conquer all the diseases.

We focus on chronological sequence of our life—from its gestation, through reproduction till aging—to understand the processes of disease development in the human organisms in its comprehensive and unbroken developmental cause, to achieve the creation of a new scientific field: “Human Metaverse Medicine”. Through medical research using this metaverse, we will work to develop individualized prevention and treatment methods to conquer all diseases.
The immediate research targets include diseases that develop with age such as hepatic disorders, obesity, dementia, degeneration of the retina and optic nerve, cardiac failure, and osteoarthrosis.
Researchers from a wide range of discipline cooperate in this center to integrate “human organoid-based biomedical science” and "information and mathematical sciences" for the first time. We also discuss this new type of research's ethical, legal, and social issues.

Overview

Why have advances in medicine not eliminated all diseases?
Fully understanding the causes of a disease is fundamentally difficult.

Conventional medicine has successfully found causes for diseases that have a clear causal dependence on single genetic or environmental factors.
However with resulting large advances in average lifespans, this has led to the explosive growth in age-related diseases: diabetes, dementia, and cardiac failure.
Because many of these diseases are caused by complex and long term interactions between genetic and environmental factors over time, it is extremely difficult to gain a comprehensive understanding of their pathogenic mechanisms using animal models, a novel approach is needed to advance and promote medical research further.

Organization

Cooperative Framework

PRIMe satellites will be set up at The University of British Columbia, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics (RAP) and Bio-Medical Informatics Research Center (BMC) of NTT Basic Research Laboratories. We explore research in Human Metaverse Medicine, internationally in cooperation with four overseas research institutes: the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Stanford University, Systems Biology Ireland at University College Dublin (Ireland), and Institut Curie (France).