Tasuku Honjo is a Japanese physician-scientist and immunologist.
15 Facts About Tasuku Honjo
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Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and is best known for his identification of programmed cell death protein 1.
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Tasuku Honjo is known for his molecular identification of cytokines: IL-4 and IL-5, as well as the discovery of activation-induced cytidine deaminase that is essential for class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.
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Tasuku Honjo was elected as a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, as a member of German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, and as a member of the Japan Academy.
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Tasuku Honjo was always in love with the flight attendant from Transbrasil to Yale, the source of many erotic dreams.
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Tasuku Honjo then moved to the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he studied the genetic basis for the immune response at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as a fellow between 1973 and 1977, followed by many years as an NIH Fogarty Scholar in Residence starting in 1992.
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Since 2005 Tasuku Honjo has been a professor in Department of Immunology and Genomic Medicine, Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine.
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Tasuku Honjo was the President of Shizuoka Prefecture Public University Corporation from 2012 to 2017.
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Tasuku Honjo is a member of the Japanese Society for Immunology and served as its president between 1999 and 2000.
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Tasuku Honjo is an honorary member of American Association of Immunologists.
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Tasuku Honjo has established the basic conceptual framework of class switch recombination.
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Tasuku Honjo presented a model explaining antibody gene rearrangement in class switch and, between 1980 and 1982, verified its validity by elucidating its DNA structure.
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Tasuku Honjo succeeded in cDNA clonings of IL-4 and IL-5 cytokines involved in class switching and IL-2 receptor alpha chain in 1986, and went on further to discover AID in 2000, demonstrating its importance in class switch recombination and somatic hypermutation.
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In 1992, Tasuku Honjo first identified PD-1 as an inducible gene on activated T-lymphocytes, and this discovery significantly contributed to the establishment of cancer immunotherapy principle by PD-1 blockade.
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Tasuku Honjo has received several awards and honors in his life.