Innovation Center of NanoMedicine (iCONM)

The Innovation Center of NanoMedicine (iCONM) is a leading facility of King Skyfront, that is a biotech and healthtech innovation cluster in Kawasaki City. iCONM started the operation in April 2015 with Kawasaki Institute of Industrial Promotion in order to drive "Center of Open Innovation Network for Smart Health (COINS)" as a part of Japanese governmental research program "Center of Innovation (COI) Stream". Designed for the purpose of promoting "open innovation" through industry-academia-government and medicine-engineering collaborations with state-of-the-art facilities and experimental equipment capable of conducting the R&D from organic synthesis and micro-processing to preclinical studies. This is a very unique research center that is hardly found in the world. smart nanomachine® is a spherical or rod-shaped molecular assembly with a size of several tens of nm formed by associating amphiphilic polymers with various functional molecules in water. 1 nm is one billionth of a meter. If one compares the height of a person to the diameter of the earth, the size of one cell is the size of a football stadium, and the size of smart nanomachine® is the size of a soccer ball. H. Cabral, K. Miyata, K. Osada, K. Kataoka, “Block copolymer micelles in nanomedicine applications” Chem. Rev. 2018, 118 6844-6892. (DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemrev.8b00199) Using this technology, we are aiming to establish in-body hospitals® that allow us to maintain our health unknowingly. Several type of smart nanomachine® detect abnormalities in the body very early and predicts the possibility of developing disease in the future. Also they can fix the abnormalities to prevent serious diseases. This is the future world we are currently drawing with our colleagues who joined from academia or industry of the world with different background aiming to establish in-body hospitals®.