Tokyo, Japan, April 1, 2014 - Astellas Pharma Inc. (Tokyo: 4503, President and CEO: Yoshihiko Hatanaka, hereinafter called “Astellas”) has established the "Regenerative Medicine Unit" as of April 1, 2014 as an organization reporting to the Senior Vice President and President, Drug Discovery Research in order to promptly establish regenerative medicine research and build an autonomous and highly agile research management structure.
Astellas announced in May last year that it would expand the effort in the regenerative medicine and would make full-fledged effort in the cell therapy in addition to the discovery research and development of conventional pharmaceuticals for regenerative medicine that it had been working on. Now Astellas has established a new organization that will specialize in the research of the regenerative medicine and cell therapy to accelerate the advancement to the emerging medical field with cutting-edge technology platform.
The Regenerative Medicine Unit will implement the following activities in order to continuously create pipelines for regenerative medicine and cell therapy that will have advantages in the competition, in a speedy manner.
To establish and maintain technology platform involving regenerative medicine and cell therapy taking advantage of multi-functional characteristics of cells in order to realize higher efficacy of treatment that cannot be achieved by existing therapy.
To bear the hub function as the core research unit of regenerative medicine and cell therapy research.
This Unit will seek for the talents with variety of experience and knowledge from inside and outside the company along with the progress of the research and development and will expand the organizational platform.
###
