A 26-site, two-year double-blind trial in Japan found high-absorption curcumin did not cut colon polyp recurrence overall (risk ratio 0.98), but large adenomas were about 44% lower. Not proof of cancer prevention.
The 47th Honda Prize goes to Graeme Clark and Ingeborg Hochmair for the multichannel cochlear implant, now fitted in more than one million people. Why did a carmaker founder's foundation pick it?
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.
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's National Institute of Genetics and Danish partners built a photovoltaic retinal implant with carbon electrodes and 40-micrometer pixels. The implant already in patients uses 100, and that width sets the ceiling.
A Japanese team pinned down when CD4 killer T cells start to expand: right around age 100. The study needed blood from ten donors over 110, and the cohort that could supply them took thirty years to build.
The 2026 Lasker Basic Medical Research Award went to Masashi Yanagisawa and Emmanuel Mignot for orexin. It explained narcolepsy, but the industry built sleeping pills first. The narcolepsy drug arrived 28 years later.
Get out of bed if you are not asleep in 20 minutes. That rule belongs to CBT-I, which a University of Tokyo analysis puts at 41% remission against 28% for pills. Japan covered it in June 2026, after rejecting it in 2024.
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.
Astellas and Kyowa Kirin are the first Japanese drugmakers to sign most-favored-nation pricing deals with Washington. A September 29 tariff deadline explains the timing, and Japanese prices sit inside the U.S. formula.
Japan recorded 86,473 IVF births in 2024, about 1 in 8 of its 686,173 births. Treatments fell to 550,265 while the multiple-birth rate rose to 4.15 percent, and the 2022 insurance reform helps explain both.
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.
Tourists are buying eyeglasses in Japan, where no prescription is required and an Osaka store says it can go from eye test to handover in 25 minutes. In the US, a replacement pair can take two weeks to a month.
Cold sleep was a movie prop. Then ESA calculated that a hibernating crew would cut a Mars spacecraft's mass by a third, and a Japanese lab found the brain switch. With humans, it is still a matter of hours.
Seven Japanese research groups repeated two landmark University of Tokyo senolytics experiments under blinded conditions and found no effect. The original team's rebuttal ran the same day, in the same journal.
Mice spent two days in artificial hibernation and lost more than half the synapses in the hippocampus, yet still knew where the food was. What survived was not the big connections but the tightly clustered ones.
Kagawa University Hospital treated a three-year-old girl's recurrent C. diff colitis with her father's gut bacteria. A year on, no relapse. US-approved products exclude children, and the EU sets shared rules in 2027.
In 200 colorectal cancer patients from Tokyo and Osaka, 44.8 percent of tumours carried a gut bacterium's mutational signature, rising to about 70 percent under 40. The damage may predate the age of ten.
A German team had 50 students play Super Monkey Ball on a Wii and then work an arthroscopy box trainer. The game scores tracked surgical scores. Splatoon 2 did not, and gamer status predicted nothing.
PET scans of 37 patients whose hallucinations began after age 40 found tau, the protein behind Alzheimer's, in 64.9% of them against 14.9% of controls. They split into three near-equal groups.