National Institute of Biomedical Innovation

The goal of NIBIO is to support the development of innovative pharmaceutical and medical products in Japan, while the objective of NIHN is to help improve the health and wellbeing of the Japanese population through surveys and studies on hygiene, nutrition, and diet. This organizational restructuring allowed NIBIO to launch a new division, the Center for Drug Design Research. NIBIO believes that partnership is a key pillar of its mission, and aims to become a coordinating hub for industry-academia-government collaboration. Another pillar of NIBIO's mission is to provide assistance for drug discovery. NIBIO is actively engaged in furthering drug discovery efforts as a core member of the Drug Discovery Support Network, a national initiative. In addition to the Research Center for Medicinal Plant Resources and the Tsukuba Primate Research Center, both of which existed at the time of the 2015 merger, NIBIO established in 2017 the Center for Rare Disease Research and the Center for Vaccine and Adjuvant Research in order to pursue creative research and development (R&D) programs. The 2019 inauguration of the Artificial Intelligence Center for Health and Biomedical Research (ArCHER) represented an expansion of NIBIO's R&D effort. The immediate goal of ArCHER is to accelerate drug discovery and development by utilizing advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Its long-term goals include applying AI to research on food and nourishment and making contributions to a healthy ageing society through individualizing and optimizing diet and nutrition. Thus, the new center contains the terms "health" and "biomedical" in its name. The organizational merger of NIBIO and NIHN opened the door to new domains of research that span the expertise of the two institutes. While the establishment of ArCHER is one such example, an ongoing project on gut bacteria is another. Before the organizational merger, NIHN was engaged in an ongoing prospective cohort study of Tokyo residents. In 2015, this study was expanded to include ...