The medical school will welcome Takanori Takebe, MD, PhD, in October as the featured speaker for Seminars in Investigative Medicine.
Dr. Takebe’s presentation is scheduled for noon to 1 p.m. on Wednesday, October 22, 2025, in TBL 2 at the W.E. Upjohn M.D. Campus in downtown Kalamazoo. A pizza lunch from Jets will be provided for attendees.
The event is free and MEDU and CE credit is available. For more information about CE credit, please go to https://bit.ly/3UEVTve.
If you plan to attend, please register here. Individuals who RSVP will be admitted before those without a reservation.
Dr. Takebe serves as director for Commercial Innovation at the Cincinnati Children’s Center for Stem Cell and Organoid Research and Medicine (CuSTOM) and as endowed chair of Organoid Medicine. In addition to his appointment as an associate professor in the University of Cincinnati Department of Pediatrics, Dr. Takebe is a professor at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University’s Institute of Research.
Currently, Dr. Takebe’s lab is focused on developing an “in-a-dish" engineering strategy for directing complex hepatogenesis from human stem cells.
“My ultimate goal is to save children in need of a new liver through the development of organoids —stem-cell-derived miniature organs,” Dr. Takebe explained on the Cincinnati Children’s website. “Organoid technology allows for the study of drug development and transplant applications otherwise impossible.”
Dr. Takebe’s lab has been successful in designing complex miniature organs in a dish from pluripotent stem cells, for example, by integration of vascular, mesenchymal and immune components into human liver organoids, according to the Cincinnati Children’s website.
Most notably, while studying early liver development, Dr. Takebe’s research team engineered human stem cells into multi-organs composed of hepato-biliary-pancreatic tissue with interconnected structures.
Seminars in Investigative Medicine is a research seminar series at WMed aimed at bringing together the community of investigators both within – and outside — the medical school.