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Are you familiar with the Medicinal Plant Garden at the Urawa-Kyoritsu Campus? Since joining the Faculty of Pharmacy in 2021, I have been appointed as the Director of the Medicinal Plant Garden (though I am usually based at the Shiba-Kyoritsu Campus, so specialized staff handle the day-to-day management of the garden). The Medicinal Plant Garden spans approximately 3,500 square meters and cultivates over 800 species of plants, including source plants for crude drugs listed in the Japanese Pharmacopoeia, as well as familiar medicinal and poisonous plants. It is open to the public, so I encourage anyone interested to visit. Personally, I recommend the period from spring to summer when the flowers of the medicinal plants are in beautiful bloom.

My area of expertise is natural products chemistry. To date, I have conducted natural product drug discovery research, which involves finding the seeds for new drugs (drug discovery seeds) from compounds produced by organisms such as plants, fungi, and bacteria. At first glance, this type of research seems easy to understand and useful. However, as a result of many researchers vigorously pursuing this field, it has become difficult in recent years to discover new drug discovery seeds from natural compounds. Consequently, it is often said to be a traditional but outdated research philosophy.

However, organisms such as plants and microbes produce natural compounds with chemical structures that humans could never conceive, and the uniqueness and complexity of these chemical structures remain vital for drug discovery. By combining the latest methods—such as organic synthetic chemistry, genetic information from the plants and microbes that produce these compounds, and structural generators powered by generative AI—with natural products chemistry, we aim to conduct research that identifies breakthrough drug discovery seeds that cannot be found through conventional research alone.

The buildings at the campus where the aforementioned Medicinal Plant Garden is located, such as the management building, are somewhat old and have a charming atmosphere reminiscent of the Showa era. Nevertheless, it is an indispensable location for supplying the plant materials necessary for our research. Recently, we have renovated the facilities slightly so they can also be utilized for microbial cultivation. We aim to conduct groundbreaking research using the latest methods while making good use of long-standing knowledge and our physical location. I intend to continue advancing research that serves society, such as drug discovery, by practicing this "old yet new natural products chemistry."