On October 2, 2026, a Sapporo hospital gave the first commercial dose of Akuugo to a man paralyzed in a traffic accident. Why it took over two years, and what the trial evidence shows.
Tohoku University-led researchers built a DNA switch: blue light makes mRNA inside cell-sized capsules, UV stops and cuts it. Why the brake matters, and why pinpoint therapy is still far off.
Japan's gene-edited GABA tomato opened its field. It wasn't the first gene-edited food sold (US soybean oil, 2019), but the first CRISPR food shoppers could buy. How Japan's rules compare with the EU's.
A Japan-led team corrected the single-letter mutation behind the inherited nerve disease HMSN-P without cutting DNA, with effects in model mice and in patient-derived organoids, plus the 40 years of work behind it.
Japan counted 6,220 university spinouts in October 2025, more than double the 2,905 five years earlier. A gene-edited sea bream and a pigment-free coating are the way in. Each Japanese listing raises only $28 million.
Yamanashi and Riken researchers cut out the whole Y chromosome to make female clones of male mice. Read next to the same university's finding that cloning dies at 58 generations, and Osaka's eggs from male cells.
A 10 mm jellyfish rewound itself ten times in two years. A genome paper on about 1,000 genes cast it as nature's Yamanaka reprogramming; a US researcher attacked that premise with Japanese data it never cited.
A team from Osaka, Okayama and Tokyo has found why IgG antibodies outlast IgM. After mRNA vaccination, spike-specific cells were 0.14% of the long-lived bone marrow compartment, against 7.3% for influenza.
Japan's NIES has made iPS cells from four endangered birds. The flightless Okinawa rail has lost one of the two genes birds use to spot a virus. Inside the minus-160°C cell bank and the brain organoids grown from it.
A University of Tokyo and Arc Institute team has shown how the IS621 jumping gene cuts itself out of an E. coli genome, resolving a chicken-and-egg puzzle that had stood since 2024.
Japan has begun selling Telomelysin, a rewired cold virus that multiplies only inside cancer cells and goes into esophageal tumors by endoscope. Three doses list at 9.3 million yen; the trial behind it had 37 patients.