Biography

Professor Shuzo Matsushita is a specially appointed Professor of the Joint Research Center for Human Retrovirus Infection, Kumamoto University. He graduated from the Kumamoto University Medical School in 1981 and had a chance to work as a visiting fellow at NCI/NIH in 1983. He successfully isolated a human monoclonal antibody (mAb) against HTLV-I envelope. He has been in charge of clinical management for HIV+ patients at University Hospital since 1986, when he came back to Japan. He became internationally recognized in the field of neutralizing antibodies for his identification of the first neutralizing mAb, 0.5β, in 1987 and its chimeric counterpart Cβ1 that protected Chimpanzees from HIV-1 infection. He earned a PhD from Kumamoto University in 1989 for his study on HIV neutralizing mAbs. He was elected as a Governing Council Member of IAS and served as a representative from Asia & Pacific region (2016-2024). He was also the President of the Japanese Society for AIDS Research (2013~2021). He continued research on neutralization escape as well as HIV-2 and SIV neutralizing mAbs. He reported promising results from a clinical trial of humanized mAb KD-247. He is currently interested in the clinical application of a human mAb,1C10, that was isolated from an elite controller of HIV infection for the induction of HIV remission.