Taro Toyoda is a Junior Associate Professor at the Department of Cell Growth and Differentiation, Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University, Japan. He received his BS from the Department of Agriculture, and his MA and Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University. He was a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science from 2004 to 2006 at Kyoto University and from 2009 to 2010 at Tokyo Metropolitan University.
From 2006 to 2010, as a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Laurie J. Goodyear’s laboratory at the Joslin Diabetes Center, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School, he studied how exercise regulates glucose metabolism in type 2 diabetes. There he learned to use a variety of rodents as diabetic models for physiological and biochemical investigation, and molecular biological techniques including in vivo gene modification.
He shifted his research area to regenerative medicine from 2010, when he joined Dr. Kenji Osafune’s laboratory at CiRA as an assistant professor. There, his research has focused on the development of the pancreas/liver and kidney (mainly pancreas) and establishment of human models for related diseases and cell therapies. He received the Young Investigator Award from the Japan Diabetes Society for his work on the generation of pancreatic endoderm from human pluripotent stem cells in 2014. He became a Junior Associate Professor in 2015 and is continuing his research on PSC-derived pancreatic lineages to study human development and regenerative medicine. Alongside, he joined T-CiRA, a joint program between CiRA and the Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, as a sub-principal investigator in September 2015, where he researches cell therapies against type 1 diabetes. He became the principal investigator of the project in December 2016.
