Report of the 5 ^th Academic Symposium “Aiming to Overcome Intractable Itch” in Juntendo University

Abstract

　The Institute for Environmental and Gender-Specific Medicine, Juntendo University Graduate School of Medicine (founding director; CEO Hideoki Ogawa), was founded in 2002, supported by a grant from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) of Japan. Since 2013, we have been focusing on intractable itch supported by Strategic Research Foundation Grant-aided Project for Private Universities from MEXT. We have been conducting research on elucidating the pathogenesis of intractable itch and developing preventive and therapeutic methods, and the results of our research have been highly evaluated both in Japan and overseas. After the end of the above support project, Asia’s first itch research center, Juntendo Itch Research Center (JIRC), was established at our institute to promote research in this field and to return the results of our research to society. In addition, our institute has held four academic symposiums about “Aiming to overcome intractable itch” since 2014 in order to develop itch research in Japan. The 5 ^th Symposium, which was the first since JIRC was established, was held on December 7, 2019. In this “What’s New from Juntendo University, Tokyo”, we report selected aspects of the 5 ^th Symposium and advances in the field of itch research.