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After graduation of medical school, I worked as a doctor and was gratified to see patients recover day by day. But with much consideration, I began to think that discovering new drugs might have a big effect for patients rather than consulting them as a doctor.
While teaching at universities, I continued my studies of pharmacology, and also involved in developing 2 drugs, which are now on the market, with 2 different pharmaceutical companies. With a desire to develop effective drugs by my own company, I established DWTI in 1999 as a biotechnology venture company.
Drug development needs cooperation by many people with various area expertise. Therefore, it both requires researcher who share a same dream of drug development and managements and office staff who support researcher and administrative side of R&D Laboratory. I spent a long time to find those who share my dream from Hokkaido to Kyusyu. Finally, I have found those who share my strong will to develop novel drugs.
The first thing that I did was to motivate these people to keep higher level of passion as same as me. The most difficult thing in developing drugs is we have to face frequent failure. Sometimes we find unexpected toxicity in possible candidate for new drug with strong efficacy. And sometimes we face huge difficulty that we have ever imagined before developing new drugs. In that circumstance, we should overcome these obstacles with strong passion toward drug development.
Now we have organized DWTI members consists of researcher who are passionate in search of novel drugs and managements and office staff who support R&D.
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Research & Development Laboratory is located in Mie University. I had been a professor at Faculty of Medicine there. Some of my students are now professor who share the idea of “The School of Hidaka”. It was a good coincidence when Mie University was searching for opportunity to establish collaborative research project, while we were also planning to have a research laboratory. We established Institute of Human Research Promotion and Drug Development under collaborative agreement. Not being a contribution course, academia and industry is equally independent. Those who can claim a patent right, if they find novel discovery at the Laboratory. If an achievement is made by a professor through a university class, the achievement is shared by the professor and DWTI. We drew the line for a patent right before the collaboration.
Drawing the attention not only from masters and doctors at Mie University, and also from postgraduate students in late 20’s and 30’s from other universities, DWTI has gathered employees.
Although we have added new researchers in R&D Laboratory, we do have small numbers of researchers doing synthesize to biochemical examination, compared with a big pharmaceutical company with 100 to 200 R&D employees.
In DWTI, each researcher has responsibilities and has same value in team work. I think there is a resemblance between R&D Laboratory and Japan Olympic team who won the bronze medal in 400m run male relay at Beijin Olympic Game. While major candidates for the medals made mistakes in exchanging zone, Japan team made no mistakes and passed baton to the next runner. That is the very same thing in R&D. Each researcher (runner) passes baton to the next one. It depends on the baton pass whether we are able to develop a great medicine in a short period of time successfully. I am proud to work with these expert researchers with team work.
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“What is a biotechnology venture company?” It’s a question I was asked some times. I thought everybody knows what biotechnology venture is. Some people think that biotechnology venture is a slimmed-down pharmaceutical company which has whole business field from drug development to sales. These days, several companies share their roles in drug business dividing their roles from drug discovery to drug sales. Our business field is drug discovery, in upstream of a drug business, and we obtain a patent. Our business is a hard one, but developing drug after securing a patent is still a hard business. It is required a proof of concept through various clinical stages, which cost a lot of money, time and labor of experienced scientist, to show its product value for a pharmaceutical company. That’s because it is said that “Death Valley lies between university-launched venture companies and pharmaceutical companies.” It is extremely hard to bring the discovered drug to pharmaceutical company as a commercial product. So how we can overcome? We have The Drug Western Method, as we have the name on our company’s name. With this method, we add value to our drug candidates with identifying action mechanism. That’s why DWTI survived not lying under Death Valley.
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To develop several new drugs which are commercialized in the market. That is our sincere desire to develop effective drugs sold worldwide and serve for patients in need.
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