Dr. Sugaya is a full professor at the University of Central Florida. His primary interest is in treating neurodegenerative diseases by stem cell technologies, and his work at UCF has been introduced by Wall Street Journal and other media. He is a Director of the Stem Cell Laboratory and Director of the Neuroscience Consortium for Central Florida.
His laboratory, which consists of 26 individual in the Biomolecular Science Center, College of Medicine, is very active. His team filed 31 patents since he moved to UCF in 2004. Now they are conducting totally new research in the animal to treat neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and stroke in animal studies using adult human stem cells, which eliminate ethical issues and many other concerns associated with embryonic stem cells. One of the research goals is to produce brain cells from the patient’s own adult stem cells, and another is to increase endogenous stem cells by systemic administration of a drug. The research teams also recently succeeded in producing retina and inner hair cells from adult human stem cells to treat blindness and deafness. Kiminobu Sugaya, Ph.D., grew up in Yokohama, Japan.
He studied pharmacology at the Science University of Tokyo, where he earned a B.S., an M.S. and a Ph.D. Dr. Sugaya received his postdoctoral training from Dr. Ezio Giacobini, who built the base for the current cholinesterase Alzheimer’s disease therapies, at the Southern University of Illinois (1988-1989), where he showed that a certain type of cholinergic receptor is reduced in Alzheimer’s disease (human study). After the postdoctoral training he worked three years as a lecturer in his alma mater since he received a grant to set up a new institute from the Japanese government.
Then Dr. Sugaya moved to the Mayo Clinic at Jacksonville in 1992, where he expanded his research with molecular biological techniques and introduced the hypothesis of glial activation as a mechanism of neurodegeneration (animal and human studies). There, he finished his postdoctoral training and became Assistant Professor of Pharmacology and Associate Consultant. His article became the front page of Molecular Brain Research.
Dr. Sugaya moved to the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1997. There he became Associate Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, Ophthalmology and Bioengineering. He has further expanded his research area to the biology of the neural stem cell (NSC), and his publication regarding improvement of memory in the aged animal by human stem cell transplantation was well received from the society and reported by Washington Post, BBC, NBC, ABC and other media all over the world. The possible use of human stem cells to treat age-associated memory problems was shown for the first time as a result of this study. This was followed by his move to UCF in 2004.
