Takuro Miyazaki

Takuro Miyazaki is an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Showa University School of Medicine in Tokyo, Japan. He received his undergraduate from Showa University School of Pharmacy. He obtained His Ph.D. in 2009 from Showa University School of Pharmacy, with a thesis on calcium homeostasis and mechanotransduction in vascular endothelial cells. In 2011, he was recruited as faculty at Showa University School of Medicine.

His research interests are the field of intracellular protein catabolism, in particular their impact on vascular functions. He discovered that calpain-2, an intracellular calcium-dependent protease, in vascular endothelial cells associates with the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis (Miyazaki T et al. Circulation. 2011;124:2522-2532), and identified that calpain dysregulation is responsible for pathological angiogenesis, such as tumor angiogenesis and retinopathy (Miyazaki T et al. Circ Res. 2015;116:1170-1181). More recent, he identified that calpain-6, an atypical non-proteolytic calpain, participates in cholesterol uptake in macrophages, thereby accelerating atherosclerosis development (Miyazaki T et al. J Clin Invest. 2016;126:3417-3432).

His work has been awarded with several prestigious prizes, among them the Young Investigator’s Award of the Japan Atherosclerosis Society in 2012 and the Young Investigator’s Award of the Japanese Vascular Biology and Medicine Organization in 2013. He is councilor of the Japan Atherosclerosis Society and the Japanese Vascular Biology and Medicine Organization.