Biography

Dr. Tetsuro Matano worked as an Orthopaedic surgeon for five years from 1985 and then started basic research on Virology. He obtained a Doctor of Medical Sciences at the Graduate School of Medicine, Univ. Tokyo in 1994. He started his study on AIDS pathogenesis using monkey AIDS models at NIAID, NIH, and reported crucial evidence indicating the importance of CD8+ T cell responses in immunodeficiency virus control. He has been a Professor at the Institute of Medical Science, Univ. Tokyo since 2006. He was appointed as the Director of the AIDS Research Center in NIID in 2010 and the Deputy Director-General in NIID in 2022. At the establishment of the new organization, JIHS, in April, 2025, he was appointed as the Director-General of NIID in JIHS. He was a co-chair of the AIDS Panel in the U.S.-Japan Cooperative Medical Science Program from 2014 to 2023. He has been a Governing Council member of IAS and a co-chair of the HIV Vaccine Industry Partnership Group since 2024. He has established a unique AIDS model using MHC-defined rhesus macaques for analysis of HIV/SIV-specific T cell responses and developed a novel CTL-based HIV vaccine system using Sendai viral vectors, whose clinical trial phase I at Rwanda, Kenya, and the U.K. in collaboration with IAVI confirmed its safety and immunogenicity. He is now working on virus-host immune interaction, microbiome, and the development of vaccines against HIV-1, HTLV-1, and SARS-CoV-2 infection. He also plays a key role in facilitating human resource development and international cooperation in JIHS.