Ryuji Morizane's Biography

Ryuji Morizane, Associate Biologist, Renal Division, Brigham and Women’s Hospital Affiliated Faculty, Harvard Stem Cell Institute

Dr. Morizane has earned an M.D. in 2005 as well as a Ph.D. in 2011 at Keio University School of Medicine in Japan. He has a long-standing interest in translational research using pluripotent stem cells especially for genetic kidney diseases and drug discovery, and understanding mechanisms of kidney injury, repair and fibrosis. He has been working on pluripotent stem cell research since 2007 when he became a graduate student at Graduate School of Keio University in Japan. He identified growth factors and transcriptional factors to promote the differentiation of pluripotent stem cells into kidney lineage cells, and published several publications related to kidney differentiation from pluripotent stem cells, kidney injury and fibrosis, or rare kidney diseases. He came to the USA in 2012, and has spent three years conducting scientific research in kidney differentiation from human pluripotent stem cells during a postdoctoral fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. He worked with researchers from Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and contributed to establishment of the differentiation protocol from human pluripotent stem cells into intermediate mesoderm cells and proximal tubule-like cells. Then, he obtained a faculty position as Associate Biologist and Instructor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2015. To further facilitate the differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells into kidney lineages, he redesigned the differentiation approach where he precisely followed in vivo kidney development. He established a protocol to induce nephron progenitor cells with nearly 90% efficiency within 8~9 days of differentiation, which subsequently differentiated into nephron (kidney) organoids with multi-segmented nephron structures. This novel system has great potential for studies on kidney disease, nephrotoxicity of drugs, and kidney regeneration. He received Research Excellence Award at Discover Brigham in 2015 and Career Development Award at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2016.